This essay was adapted from a speech delivered at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference. All views are the author’s. As I’ve always seen it, part of being a conservative is acknowledging the traditions you were raised in. And for me, one of those traditions was the conservative legal movement. I was taught, within that tradition, that one …
JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes joined by Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit as well as Prof. Randy Barnett of Georgetown University Law Center discussed Prof. Arkes’s book Mere Natural Law on Nov. 10, 2023 at the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. Prof. Robert George of Princeton …
In reviewing “Mere Natural Law,” scholar Jordan Perkins argues that it is necessary that legal cognition be infused with moral reasoning.
On May 6, Prof. Gerard Bradley of the University of Notre Dame School of Law delivered an address titled, “Moral Truth and Constitutional Conservatism.” We’re pleased to present Prof. Bradley’s lecture in this special edition of the Anchoring Truths Podcast.
In a response to Ed Whelan’s critique of “On Overturning Roe,” Prof. Arkes insists that the moral argument against Roe is the only logical one for judges who believe in the deep wrong of abortion. The pro-life cause rests on objective moral truths, not on value judgments, and as a result does not require judges (as Whelan claims) “to read their own moral convictions into the Constitution.”
