Experts in the News | Miller Center

Barbara Perry: Kavanaugh the perfect nominee for Republicans

University of Virginia Miller Center scholar Barbara Perry expects Judge Brett Kavanaugh to push the U.S. Supreme Court to the right while avoiding some of the incendiary language and judicial opinions of more ultra-conservative judges.

Barbara Perry

How Diplomacy With North Korea Can Work

At the end of last week, the next phase of U.S.–North Korean diplomacy got off to a rocky start in Pyongyang. Following a set of talks with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the North Korean Foreign Ministry criticized Washington’s “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization.” Pompeo maintains that the meetings were “productive.” Pompeo was right, in the sense that the talks again showed why too narrow a focus on denuclearization has been and continues to be a recipe for failure. A one-track devotion to ending the nuclear program will force all other important issues to queue up behind it. As pressure mounts to resolve the lead issue, the whole diplomatic process could stall or even fail, leading to crisis once again. In contrast, a broader process would actually do more to ease progress on denuclearization, as well as multiple other fronts.

Philip Zelikow

What will it really take to bring peace to the Korean peninsula?

North Korea poses one of the world's trickiest diplomatic puzzles, and focusing solely on denuclearization won't solve it, according to a State Department veteran and University of Virginia faculty member who recently visited the Korean peninsula. History professor and former State Department official Philip Zelikow was in South Korea last week to participate in discussions with government officials, diplomats and scholars about ongoing negotiations between North and South Korea and the United States.

Philip Zelikow

Few specifics offered in plan to merge Labor, Education departments

Chris Lu, deputy secretary of labor from 2014 to 2017 and now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia Miller Center, had a similar thought. "The Department of Education and Department of Labor have never been particularly well-liked agencies within the Republican Party," he said. "So the idea that you can take what I consider to be two important functions and basically merge them into one, in my mind is not only about efficiency, it's a precursor to starting to shrink both of those functions."

Chris Lu

Where Did the Radical Right Come From?

Kathleen Belew’s gripping study of white power, “Bring the War Home,” was written before the city of Charlottesville became a hashtag, and is largely concerned with activities from the 1970s and ’80s. But it is impossible to read the book without recalling more recent events. Her activists — for indeed, these were activists building a grass-roots movement — consolidated power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is that starting point that hints at the book’s explosive thesis: that the white power movement that reached a culmination with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing emerged as a radical reaction to the war.

Nicole Hemmer

Will Trump get his Bork on the Supreme Court?

Trump has characteristically upended precedent in Supreme Court appointments, relying on interest groups to provide lists of candidates during the 2016 campaign, considering judges with clear track records, and enticing Kennedy into retirement. A Republican majority in the Senate, slim though it is, gives this president more leeway than Reagan had in filling the swing seat of Justice Powell when the Democrats controlled the upper chamber. By adding Utah senator Mike Lee to the roster of potential nominees, Trump has considered departing from the Reagan-initiated pattern of naming sitting judges to the Supreme Court. A senator hasn’t been appointed to the high bench since Harry Truman nominated his former Senate colleague Harold Burton in 1945.

Barbara Perry