The James Wilson Foundation on Natural Rights and the American Founding

Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals discussed his new book, “51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law,” (Oxford University Press, 2018) at the Heritage Foundation on June 12, 2018. In the video below, the Judge provides a brief overview of his central thesis, and then talks about […]

Writing at First Things, Professor Arkes weighs in on the decision of the Supreme Court in Masterpiece Cakeshop. The majority opinion has been described as a “narrow” decision to vindicate a Colorado baker in his refusal to supply a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage ceremony. At stake were the defendant’s rights to free expression […]

JWI Fellow Alumnus Prof. Evan Bernick ’15, in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, examines the sparsely addressed doctrine of judicial deference to agency fact-finding, in which the Administrative Procedure Act, as well as Supreme Court precedents, have created a standard of broad deference to an agency’s findings by holding that reviewing courts may only […]

Writing in City Journal, Professor Hadley Arkes debunks the now-iconic narrative–championed most recently in Steven Spielberg’s film The Post–that the Pentagon Papers case (1971) presents a high-water mark for the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence concerning the First Amendment. The per curiam opinion of the Court vindicated the Washington Post’s right to publish classified government documents prior to an executive […]

In a two part piece at Public Discouse, JWI Affiliated Scholar Professor Daniel Mark discusses the threats and challenges that religious freedom faces internationally and domestically. In “Religious Totalitarianism, Secular Totalitarianism, and Other Threats to International Religious Freedom”, Mark comments on the differences between Religious Totalitarianism and Secular Totalitarianism and the effects it has on […]

Catherine Glenn Foster, a 2016 James Wilson Fellow, offers commentary on the pending case on the rights of NIFLA v. Becerra before the Supreme Court with her piece, “If walls could talk, would they advertise abortions?” Foster, who serves as president of Americans United for Life, summarizes the background of the case and argues why the […]

Tom Johnson was recently hired as a general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Previously, he was the Deputy Solicitor General for the State of West Virginia. He also practiced appellate and constitutional law and labor and employment law as Of Counsel at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Prior to working at Gibson Dunn, […]

In a piece for the Claremont Review of Books, JWI Senior Scholar Prof. Michael Uhlmann reviews Prof. Joseph Postell’s Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government. Prof. Uhlmann articulates the reasons for the intellectual, legal, and political development of the administrative state. Some Excerpts: “By allowing agency rules to have binding effect […]

Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Prof. Hadley Arkes details the intellectual poverty of defending a notion of “free of speech” that denies any limiting principles on speech. The piece,  “Conservatives and Freedom of Speech: Backing into Relativism?” is nicely described by Scott Johnson of PowerlineBlog: “Professor Arkes focuses on the philosophical ground on […]

Writing in The Catholic Thing, Professor Hadley Arkes defends Gordon Giampietro, a nominee for a federal district judgeship in Wisconsin in a piece titled “Does Gordon Giampietro Need a Defense?”  A “controversy” was generated because of a supportive comment that Mr. Giampietro posted on a column written by Professor Arkes in The Catholic Thing four […]