#1675 What Is Habeas Corpus and Why Does It Matter?

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

Clay and historian Beau Breslin discuss the doctrine of habeas corpus and its role in the current debate about how to handle undocumented immigrants in the United States. In a nutshell, habeas corpus means “hey, produce the body.” You cannot just arbitrarily snatch someone off the street and make them disappear. Habeas corpus was so important to the Founding Fathers that they embedded it in the first Article of the Constitution, right off the top, and did not postpone it to the Bill of Rights. The United States has a mixed history of its adherence to the doctrine of habeas corpus, which Beau Breslin believes is THE fundamental right in America and all over the world. And yet, Professor Breslin, who teaches at an elite college in New York state, admitted that the majority of his students, even in a class on constitutional theory, would probably be unable to define just what habeas corpus means, where it came from, and why it is critically important to a free and enlightened society. This episode was recorded on September 12, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to my introduction to this week's podcast.
0:04.5	Another really extraordinary conversation with my friend Bo Breslin of Skidmore College in upstate New York.
0:11.4	He's the author of several books on the U.S. Constitution.
0:13.8	He's been a frequent guest on this program.
0:15.9	He's one of my go-to individuals, and I love our conversations.
0:20.0	And today we talked about habeas corpus.
0:23.6	A habeas corpus in a nutshell means produce the body. There has to be due process. You can't
0:28.5	be detained indefinitely. There has to be some sort of a legal proceeding in which your body
0:35.4	is actually brought to court so we know you're still alive,
0:38.3	that you haven't been banished to El Salvador or somewhere, and that you're entitled to
0:42.2	certain protections of due process, that you just can't be arbitrarily arrested and detained.
0:48.9	And as you all know, that principle is under enormous erosion at the moment.
0:53.6	And Christy Noam, the governor of South Dakota, not North Dakota, testified before Congress was
0:58.8	asked what habeas corpus is and got it so wrong that the whole world should blush.
1:05.0	The whole world that cares about human rights should blush and demand that we do better.
1:10.6	But that was a starting point and we had a really lively conversation about the history
1:16.3	of habeas corpus, how agonizing its history has been, how we ourselves, say, Japanese internment
1:22.1	in World War II, or Abraham Lincoln trying to hold the union together or the alien and sedition and alien
1:29.3	enemies act of 1798, that we, the United States, even though habeas corpus is guaranteed inside
1:36.3	the Constitution, not in the Bill of Rights, we have failed from time to time in times of perceived
1:42.3	a real national emergency, and we need to
1:44.6	acknowledge that. But it seems to me, and Bo and I agree, that habeas corpus, although not sexy,
	...

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