The Reading Room
A source
The Separation of Powers
When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty... there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.
The principle the Framers built the government on, named and argued by Montesquieu a generation before they read him. Liberty dies, he warned, when the power to make law, to enforce it, and to judge under it collect in the same hands. The three branches of the American government are this sentence, carried across an ocean and turned into architecture. The Courts lens rests on it. Every fight over one branch reaching into another's work is, at bottom, a fight over whether this old warning still holds.