The James Wilson Foundation on Natural Rights and the American Founding

On August 8th, Prof. Hadley Arkes appeared on The Eric Metaxas Show to discuss a variety of subjects with Mr. Metaxas including the Kavanaugh hearing, the state of American jurisprudence on abortion, natural law and moral reasoning, and Prof. Arkes’s earliest days at Amherst. You’re encouraged to listen to the full interview below.

JWI Affiliated Scholar Justin Dyer recently joined Charles Heller on Liberty Watch Radio to discuss the place of reasoning from the Natural Law in public life, and especially its relevance to the Supreme Court’s debates about the issue of slavery leading up to the Civil War. Professor Dyer fielded questions from callers as well as Mr. […]

In a powerful, sobering essay for Public Discourse, JWI Senior Scholar David Forte takes the occasion of Gerber’s newly named baby of the year to offer a reflection on the natural right to life and the genocidal logic at play in significant segments of the “pro-choice” community. Lucas, a beaming two-year-old, is the company’s first ever […]

With the Supreme Court’s recent decision in NIFLA vs. Becerra (2018), the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy at the end of July, and the President’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court, many are speculating on what these events mean for future cases that consider freedom of speech and abortion, as well as what […]

With the upcoming hearings over Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh,  Prof. Hadley Arkes makes the case for a different Republican strategy at National Review Online with his latest essay, “Abortion and the Brett Kavanaugh Hearings: A Plan for Senate Republicans.” Prof. Arkes begins by reviewing the traditional Republican playbook: promising to have the nominee keep his […]

Writing in The Public Discourse ”Secular Materialism Can’t Make Sense of Reality“, Professor Justin Dyer, a JWI Affiliated Scholar, confronts the philosophies of materialism which seem to increasingly gain prominence in modern society. Pointing to the thoughts of modern philosophers such as Saul Smilansky, he observes that secular materialism, which reduces “every thought, every hope, and every […]

Richard Reinsch, the editor of the Online Library of Law and Liberty and the host of LibertyLawTalk, interviewed Hadley Arkes to discuss his thoughts on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on issues of speech, as articulated in cases such as Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), Matal v. Tam (2016), and NIFLA v. Becerra (2018). Their discussion centered on the Court’s tendency […]

In an essay titled, “Another Pro-Life Victory?,” published at First Things, Professor Hadley Arkes probes the logic of the recent Supreme Court ruling in NIFLA v. Becerra. In doing so, he finds the conservative justices achieving yet another laudable outcome this term: a victory for the right of pro-life pregnancy centers to refuse to comply with a […]

In defense of his recently published piece “Conservatives and Freedom of Speech,” Professor Arkes, writing in Public Discourse, carefully responds to Professor Robert Miller’s critique  that even the most objectively offensive and harmful speech ought to be completely protected in order to safeguard against the tendency of legislatures to make errors of “false positives”. Professor Arkes […]

On Friday, June 15th, JWI’s Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and Intern Michael McCall shared a discussion with Joseph Tartakovsky, author of the new book The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America’s Supreme Law (Encounter Books, 2018). Mr. Tartakovsky, a lawyer by trade, is currently the James Wilson Fellow in Constitutional Law […]