natural law

Combating Wokism & Utopianism with Daniel Mahoney

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Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for an episode featuring a scholar quite near and dear to us at the James Wilson Institute, Daniel Mahoney. Mahoney is an affiliated scholar with the James Wilson Institute, and with his latest book he applies his gift of prose to perhaps our most pertinent cultural issue, the rise and

Rahimi’s Natural Law Moment – Part 2

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In Part One of this essay, I argued that the Supreme Court’s opinion in United States v. Rahimi set the stage for lawyers and judges to incorporate natural law principles into their reasoning. In Rahimi, the Court appealed to the “principles underlying the Second Amendment” in order to ascertain the scope of its protections. Our

Rahimi’s Natural Law Moment – Part 1

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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

The Centrality of the Regime Question

Angelo Codevilla and Hadley Arkes

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published at Steve Hayward’s Substack here. Anchoring Truths has been given permission by Hayward to reprint Arkes’s guest post. Angelo (Codevilla) and I were always together on the question of the centrality of the political regime as the touchstone in foreign policy. My first book with Princeton, coming out of

A Violent Clash of Contrary Values – Part 2

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Editor’s Note: In Part 1 of this two-part feature, Dr. Nils Haug describes how the moral and intellectual foundations of the Torah with the Quaran and various sayings of the Prophet Muhammed from the Hadith clash in violent ways. In Part 2, Dr. Haug focuses on why this clash represents one of the gravest tests

A Violent Clash of Contrary Values – Part 1

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“Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America” (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1923) The West’s moral order originates from Judeo-Christian principles. America’s founding documents clearly reflect this fact. Upon these tenets are founded constitutionally protected human rights such as justice, mercy, equality and liberty. In

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The James Wilson Institute’s Mission is to restore to a new generation of lawyers, judges, and citizens the understanding of the American Founders about the first principles of our law and the moral grounds of their own rights.
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