Rule of Law

Our Own American Genocide: “Gosnell,” the Movie

While Gosnell tells the true story of a squalid, back-street abortion mill, we are also reminded by the film that the majority of baby murders are committed legally by nice, middle-class people who are well-connected, well-off, well-educated, well-spoken, and well-funded...

Can an Alfie Evans Case Happen in the United States?

In the case of the now-deceased toddler, Alfie Evans, the British government, through its Royal College of Pediatrics and its courts, had legal authority. Alfie had legal “interests,” which the government defined in his case, but he did not have...

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...

Edmund Burke, Daniel O’Connell, & Catholic Emancipation in Ireland

Despite their differing political views, the conservative Edmund Burke and the radical Daniel O’Connell played major roles in combatting the suppression of Catholics in eighteenth-century Ireland... In the past couple of decades, the Catholic Church has fallen...

Rhapsody on Blue: In Honor of the Fallen

I tried to explain to the police officer that I hadn’t said anything to him, but the uproar around us was immense, but I could see the fear and the fury in his eyes and as his club came within an inch of my face, I sensibly...

The Abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment

The federal judiciary is often the most dangerous branch precisely because it is considered to be the least dangerous one... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Allen Porter Mendenhall as he discusses the proper and actual extent...

Is the Rule of Law in Danger?

Having flouted and subverted the rule of law for decades, the radical elements of the progressive left in the United States now face the inevitable consequence of their concerted activity... “Donald Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of...

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...

A Solution for a Fragmented America

The cause of modern American disunity can be found in today’s twisted notions of freedom... In his masterwork, The City of God, Saint Augustine offers a definition of a people that can shed some...

Judge Gorsuch and the Loss of Our Common Mind

Textualism is a compromise, or rather a lowest common denominator, that can allow for a renewal of the rule of law. Still, it rests on a great loss—that of the common mind of our people...

The Violent Assault Upon Imagination

How fallen we are, from Dante and Beatrice to John Hinckley and Jodie Foster. "We did the best job with what we had to work with," the twenty-two-year-old jury foreman said after the unanimous decision that Hinckley was...

How Should We Treat the Evil of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfits?

It is well to be reminded again and again that, though we like to think ourselves advance agents of such progress, the strategy of gnostic manipulation of being is very ancient. John Milton suggests the point: Satan's...

Why We Don’t Care about Comey & Clinton

We are all now familiar with the decision by FBI Director James Comey not to indict Hillary Clinton for her email scandal. In his announcement, not only did Director Comey contradict a number of Secretary Clinton’s claims, he...