Fixing Columbine uses the 1999 school shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, as a metaphor for the much larger, and largely silent, epidemic of childhood dysfunction that has swept the nation in the last thirty years, claiming as its victims approximately 15 to 25 million American children annually. Using both a child development lens and comparative analysis, the book first describes the causes of the epidemic which include--for the affected children--absent adults, toxic media exposures, dysfunctional peers, and an anti-social educational environment. It then tackles the question how to fix it. The book argues that classical liberal principles as represented in the constitutional doctrines of parental autonomy and free speech simultaneously enabled the epidemic and impede the most obvious law-based solutions. It concludes with a partial answer in the public schools as they perform their original and still-salient communitarian function.

Debate over who has the authority to make foreign policy for the United States has been a constant feature of our political and constitutional history. In the modern era, the debate has come to be both shrill and stale: the proponents of presidential autonomy and the advocates of congressional supremacy start from mutually incompatible premises and come to predictable, and antagonistic, conclusions. The President's Authority Over Foreign Affairs argues that the best interpretation of our Constitution's distribution of foreign affairs authority resolves this irresolvable stand-off. Powell presents a traditional legal argument, giving careful weight to original understandings, early practice and considerations of institutional structure, and concludes that the Constitution vests the president with the clear authority to formulate and implement foreign policy. At the same time, the Constitution vests Congress with powers that enable it to exercise a near-absolute veto -- not on the president's foreign policy choices, but on his or her ability to carry those choices out. The resulting system of interlocking constitutional powers is faithful to the Constitution's text and to the purposes that are embodied in it. In making this argument, a variety of hotly contested issues are addressed, and Powell shows how constitutional interpretation enables us to reach satisfactory answers.