In the pantheon of intellectual giants of modern conservatism, standing first among equals is the late professor Harry Jaffa. Jaffa, who influenced generations of students from his academic perch at Claremont Graduate University, might have been the 20th century’s greatest scholar on the thought of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa, who along with JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley …
Could it possibly be the best of times as well as the worst of times for the pro-life movement? Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case, immediate celebration met the harsh realities of how divided the country remains on abortion. The political reaction to the Dobbs decision, with Blue States in particular enshrining …
In a recent interview on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recounted how he and his husband came to acquire their two children. He described scrolling through “different lists” of babies, sorted by race, and remarked—almost in passing—that there was “a discount” on non-white children. The tone was casual, the moment …
Conor Gallagher interviews James Wilson Founder and Co-Director Hadley Arkes to discuss how the justice system lost its soul and how to get it back. In the interview, Arkes explores natural law vis-a-vis the American justice system, determinant Supreme Court cases, federalism, and related issues. For further information on the issues discussed during the interview, …
Can one federal district court judge, even temporarily, be more powerful than the President of the United States? That’s the issue at the heart of the critical debate over the legal remedy known as the nationwide injunction. The deployment of this legal remedy by federal district court judges has increased significantly in the past ten …
For a special episode of the Anchoring Truths Podcast, we bring you a presentation featuring Prof. Julia Mahoney of the University of Virginia School of Law. Prof. Mahoney examines how the Classical Legal Tradition has been making a return in American law. She discusses some recent opinions that provide a hopeful opportunity for its return to legal …
He can do more than, as John Roberts would have him doing, in affirming the law of non-contradiction.
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 …
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 …
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 …
