Justice

Death to the Death Penalty? René Girard’s Challenge to Thomas Aquinas

Is acceptance of the death penalty contrary to the modern understanding of the dignity of the human person? The anthropology of René Girard allows for a rereading of Thomas Aquinas’ defense of capital punishment... The Catholic Church’s recent definitive...

The Supreme Court: “Never to the Right, Forever to the Left”

Despite all the unfounded fear on the left and all the equally unfounded euphoria on the right, there will be no wholesale revamping by the Supreme Court of the liberal social order that is now deeply rooted in our culture and among our people. The conservative justices' ethos of...

Brett Kavanaugh and Originalism

Even before the spectacle of Christine Balsey Ford's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the hearing for President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was characterized not by political acumen, wit, cunning, or prudence, but...

Was Aristotle the Father of Radical Individualism?

A recent essay proposes Aristotle to have “opened a path” to today’s radical individualism and relativism. In order to evaluate this thesis, we must turn to the Great Tradition of the “perennial philosophy” and ask what the great philosophers taught about virtue, justice, friendship, and...

Criminal Character and Mercy

Is it not refined cruelty to keep alive, in self-loathing, a man who is a grave danger to the innocent and a grisly horror to himself? And to do such a thing in countries long admired for the justice of their laws?...

Why Not Wife-Swapping?

In December, the Supreme Court decided not to hear a case that proposed to extend the Court’s sexual freedom cases to wife-swapping. In Coker v. Whittington, two sheriff’s deputies in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, and their wives agreed...

Wounded Beauty

Why should the sins of the guilty cause suffering to the guiltless? If God could prevent such suffering of the innocent victims of sin but refrains from doing so, isn’t he also to blame? Isn’t he in some way an accessory to the sin? In other words,...

How Reform Laws Backfire

If a reform produces unintended consequences of a troubling sort, succeeding generations of reformers will make use of those consequences not to undo the original reform, but rather to call for new action that requires an ever-larger federal government...

Russell Kirk’s Unfinished Justice

Russell Kirk thought that because justice is rooted in nature and because in its perfection transcends all time and space, one can innately observe virtue in the actions of wise women and men. Such observation of our heroes and those we admire might be the best teacher...

Socrates Rises With Christ

The completion of Plato lies in the resurrection, in the reality that sees not just the immortality of the soul but the acting person as the source of all reason... Is there any way to bring political philosophy and revelation,...

A Miscarriage of Justice? The Trial of Mary Surratt

Whether or not Mary Surratt participated in the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln will never be known with certainty. But we can judge definitively the manner in which federal authorities obtained her conviction, and ultimately her execution...

Tragic Hatred and the Magic of Mercy

What right do I have to be walking in His Love and not reaping the miserable harvest of the hateful seeds I had sown? I have no right. It’s not about rights, but about Love and the mercy which is its fruit...

The Natural Law Jurisprudence of Russell Hittinger

Natural law jurisprudence seems to be our only salvation—the only way to re-establish the proper hierarchy of laws, the only way to put the prudence back in American jurisprudence...

Why Our Legal System is Failing Us

The slow disintegration of our legal system will continue apace until and unless judges, in particular, cease acting as if the legal system they serve either does not need or does not deserve their active support...