The James Wilson Foundation on Natural Rights and the American Founding

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 […]

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 […]