What Might James Wilson Say to Today’s Supreme Court?
He can do more than, as John Roberts would have him doing, in affirming the law of non-contradiction.
Hadley Arkes
Rahimi’s Natural Law Moment – Part 1
Following the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, Hadley Arkes wrote that Justice Scalia’s putatively originalist opinion might have appealed to “something resembling—brace yourself—‘natural law.’” After all, Scalia’s look into the text and history of the Second Amendment revealed that it codified a right that preexisted the Constitution. Arkes queried, “Was he suggesting …
VIDEO: Hadley Arkes Receives 2025 Benedict Leadership Institute Award at Belmont Abbey College
Contra Koppelman: What Mere Natural Law Was About
Editors Note: This piece originally appeared in the Per Curiam section of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy as a response to a review by Prof. Andrew Koppelman of Hadley Arkes’s Mere Natural Law. It is reproduced here with permission from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Natural Law and Labor Law with Alex MacDonald
Alex MacDonald, a DC-based labor lawyer, touches on the historical roots of the right to work, the right’s connection with natural-law principles, and its return to modern jurisprudence. Informed by JWI Co-Director Hadley Arkes’s Mere Natural Law, Alex examines how that return could transform modern labor law, especially the concept of exclusive representation. This episode, …
Hadley Arkes 2024 Norton Lectures at SBTS
Video Recordings of the Norton Lectures Delivered by JWI Co-Director Prof. Hadley Arkes at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, October 8-9, 2024. Lecture I: The Enduring Rediscovery: The Polis as a Moral Association Lecture II: On Aristotle and Political Science as the “Architectonic Science” Lecture III: The American Founding and Natural Theology – And a …
Litigating the Second Amendment & Natural Right to Self-Defense with Ed Wenger
Join host Garrett Snedeker and appellate litigator Edward “Ed” Wenger to discuss a recent decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed limits on gun magazine capacity within the nation’s capital. The court affirmed a lower court’s opinion that “extra large capacity magazines” could be prohibited within city limits, but Judge Justin Walker …
The Supreme Court’s Corner Post Ruling: Restoring Justice Where It’s Due
The Supreme Court deserves some additional praise for its decision resolving a circuit split on a fine point of administrative law in Corner Post from its most recent term. Without acknowledging as much, the majority in Corner Post affirmed an elementary proposition of moral and legal justice that had fallen by the wayside. In one of his Essays on …
The Argument Arrives: Prof. Arkes Responds to Prof. Alicea on Mere Natural Law
Editor’s Note: National Review has granted Anchoring Truths permission to reprint a 2023 review by Prof. Joel Alicea of Mere Natural Law by JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes, along with Prof. Arkes’s response to Prof. Alicea. Please find Prof. Arkes’s response below, originally titled in National Review as “The Nature of the Law.” How can …
Anchoring Originalism
Editor’s Note: National Review has granted Anchoring Truths permission to reprint a 2023 review by Prof. Joel Alicea of Mere Natural Law by JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes, along with Prof. Arkes’s response to Prof. Alicea. Please find Prof. Alicea’s review in full below. Is originalism a morally empty jurisprudence? For decades, various scholars working …
