Short answers, pulled from the story.
Stephen Holmes, born on the 21st of February 1948, is an American political scientist and legal scholar. He is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and the author of numerous books on liberal democracy, antiliberalism, and political theory.
Holmes holds the Walter E. Meyer Professorship of Law at New York University. He previously taught at the University of Chicago and Princeton University.
Holmes's major books include Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), Passions and Constraint (1995), The Cost of Rights (1999, with Cass R. Sunstein), The Matador's Cape (2007), The Beginning of Politics (2017), and The Light that Failed (2019, with Ivan Krastev).
The Cost of Rights, published in 1999 by Norton and co-written with Cass R. Sunstein, argues that liberty depends on taxes because rights require government enforcement to be meaningful. The book was translated into Italian, Polish, and Chinese.
Holmes was interviewed in the 2004 BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, which examined how political leaders exploit fear of external enemies.
Holmes won the John Addison Porter Prize at Yale University in 1976, the year he completed his Ph.D. there.