In The Bob Zadek Show, “first principles” is the phrase guests and host reach for when they want to say that a policy question is not exhausted by the statute, the map or the election in front of them. The excerpts use it in at least three distinct settings — constitutional adjudication, immigration and redistricting — and in each the speaker treats first principles as constraints that operate before ordinary politics begins. Bob Zadek frames the term himself in the 2014 episode with Damon Root, describing a view of the Supreme Court as charged not with deciding what is good for the country but with seeing that the other branches adhere to the restraints the Constitution imposes on them, an adherence he calls the first principles of the Constitution and of civic life Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
Constitutional text and the judicial role
Root, asked about the debate over judicial restraint, sets out two positions. Advocates of a living Constitution, he says, hold that courts and policymakers must respond to the changing needs of the times and that constitutional language should be viewed as flexible enough to allow that response. Against this he places the view that the Constitution is a written document, not too flexible, imposing restrictions that courts must enforce even when doing so goes against what many people want the law to be able to do Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
Root agrees with Zadek’s formulation that the court’s first job is to start with the text and the history of the Constitution and of the legal powers at issue in the case. A good judge, he says, will sometimes reach a conclusion he or she does not like because the law demands it, rather than reasoning that the law seems to cut the other way but that some greater good justifies the result. Lawmakers and the president, being elected and accountable to voters, are the ones who bring the wishes of the people into fruition; the courts act as an occasional brake, because what people or lawmakers want may exceed the powers the Constitution grants or violate individual rights. Root illustrates the point with a hypothetical: if 60% of the people want to impose an unjust law on the other 40%, a pure democracy would allow it, and the less democratic Supreme Court is one of the brakes built into the system to check that majoritarian impulse Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
Zadek’s own framing of the same material is that the Court is not there to decide what is good and bad for America, and that its traditional role is far more restricted. He notes that the people’s control over the Supreme Court is remote rather than direct — they elect the president and the legislature, the president nominates and the legislature confirms — and asks to what degree the Court should be responsive to what is good for America, a question he says has often been answered wrongly when the Court speaks almost as a super-legislature Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
Freedom of movement as a first principle
The 2021 episode with Ilya Somin applies the phrase to immigration. Zadek asks what Somin’s book presents as the first principles that ought to govern all legislation regarding immigration, and describes the right to travel freely — to move from one place to another because your life will be better in the place you move to than the place you move from — as the kind of principle at issue Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Somin answers that there should be a presumption of freedom of movement across international boundaries, much like the existing presumption of freedom of movement between states within the United States, so that people can move to a location with better government policies, where they can be more free, and where they can seek out opportunities for themselves and their families. He does not claim the right is absolute, and allows that limitations may exist, but argues they should not rest simply on where a person was born or who their parents are — which he identifies as the main limiting factor in most current immigration law. He compares a policy that constricts liberty because a person was born south of the Rio Grande rather than north of it to Jim Crow racial segregation and South African apartheid, on the ground that birthplace, like race or ethnicity, is not something a person controls. Any restriction, on his account, would require strong evidence that a great harm would otherwise occur and that keeping the person from moving is the only way to prevent it Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Zadek then argues that it is a founding principle of the country that who your parents are should have no effect on the rights you enjoy, citing the colonists’ objection to peerage — the status attaching to being born to dukes or earls — as one of the principles of English society the founding generation found abhorrent and one of the reasons the colonies broke with England. He extends the argument to inherited wealth and to birth within the country, contending that strict immigration rules promote the principle of peerage Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021).
Redistricting and the purposes of districts
In the 2022 gerrymandering episode, Nick Seabrook takes up Zadek’s question about what standard an independent commission should use in drawing districts and says it brings the discussion back to the first principles with which they began. His answer is procedural and substantive at once: the commission should pay no attention to where incumbents live, to where district lines may have been gerrymandered to exist before, or to the partisanship of the people being drawn into one place or another. Instead it should ask the people in these places what their community looks like and ask residents of cities what the neighborhoods are, then draw districts grouping together citizens and neighborhoods and communities with shared interests and a shared culture Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
Seabrook describes the alternative as a churning system in which districts are tinkered with every 10 years to achieve a political goal or to make sure an incumbent is re-elected, so that over time districts get further from the underlying communities they are supposed to represent. His remedy is to wipe the slate clean, hold hearings at which members of communities say what interests need to be represented, and build districts from there rather than starting from the question of which people must be crammed into a district to save a job or keep a party in power Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022).
The same passage appears in the following day’s episode with the same guest, where Zadek asks what test or standard a commission would use and whether it would ignore everything and simply draw hexagons with the right number of people; Seabrook’s answer is the one quoted above, again framed as a return to the first principles with which the discussion began Who’s Electing Whom? Politicians or the Voters? (2022). In that episode Zadek also offers a precedent for taking politicians out of a political process: Congress, facing too many military bases and unable to vote to close one in any member’s district, appointed an independent commission and agreed by statute to be bound up or down by whatever it did, and the commission closed districts Who’s Electing Whom? Politicians or the Voters? (2022).
First principles as a brake on elections
A fourth use of the phrase appears in the 2022 election episode, where John Giadjopoulos invokes what the founding fathers said about the Constitution — that it is less about specific rules and specific laws and more about first principles — because principles should guide decision when novel or unique situations arise. Since no one knows what a president will face in office, he says he would like a candidate able to use those first principles to arrive at good conclusions, and he recommends consulting Milton Friedman’s answers on healthcare, free markets, tariffs and price fixing on the ground that the technologies have changed but the first principles have not Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022).
Zadek’s contribution to that exchange is a critique of the selection process rather than an account of principles: the individual elected president is probably elected because that candidate is the best politician, and the skills needed to be elected have nothing to do with the skills needed to be an effective president. He notes that Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines and rail transit, doing more for deregulation than Reagan or Nixon, while failing in Iran and in dealing with the manufactured shortage of gasoline, and that Reagan is perhaps the exception to the randomness because voters knew what they were getting Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022).
Across episodes
The excerpts show the phrase recurring across four episodes without a shared definition: Root treats first principles as constitutional text and history enforced by courts against majority will, Somin treats them as a presumption of free migration that cannot rest on birthplace or parentage, Seabrook treats them as the purposes districts are meant to serve, and Giadjopoulos treats them as general guides for novel situations. What changes between the earlier and later treatments is the domain rather than the doctrine — from adjudication in 2014 to immigration in 2021 and to redistricting and elections in 2022 — and no guest in these excerpts responds to another’s use of the term.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not supply a definition of first principles that the speakers share, nor do they identify a text, author or school of thought as the source of the phrase. They do not state what the Supreme Court held in any case, what any bill was named, or which amendment any dispute turned on. The 2014 excerpt breaks off at the heading for a segment on gun control and Heller v. D.C., and the 2021 excerpt breaks off at the heading for a segment on asylum law and the material support bar, so nothing from those segments is reported here.