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… The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World, by Russell Hittinger (ISI Books, 2002) As a professor of political science, I am often [...]
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 light on why we are so fragmented today. He states that a people is “a gathered multitude of rational beings united [...]
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… Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill late Justice Antonin Scalia’s spot on the Supreme Court, might follow other recent [...]
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 innocent by reason of insanity. And surely that is a conclusion we must come to, examining the [...]
We encounter all too often in our modern world the spectacular violence of such escapades as the Misfit’s murder of an anonymous family on a Georgia back road. Our daily press is full of such incidents. Its corollary, however, O’Connor expects us to come to through reflection. It is well to be reminded again and [...]
We’ve been conditioned to believe that it is experts like Hillary Clinton and James Comey who maintain the social conditions necessary for our health and happiness. We are all now familiar with the decision by FBI Director James Comey not to seek an indictment against Hillary Clinton for her email scandal. In his announcement, not [...]
Antonin Scalia espoused the idea of judicial restraint, knowing, as did the American Founders, that individuals and society require definite laws for the preservation of order and justice. In Federalist 51, James Madison wrote that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” No public figure of his generation was more acutely aware of [...]
In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into the [...]
The misguided effort to damage the statue of John C. Calhoun in Charleston is a sign of how we as contemporary Americans have a tendency to “forget who we are” and engage in what has become known as political correctness. In fact, diversity of thought is the opposite of political correctness, and is at the [...]
It was eleven years after the Declaration of Independence—and four years after American victory in the Revolutionary War—that a small group of delegates would convene in Philadelphia to create a new charter for governing the new nation. In order to comprehend this historic achievement we must first understand that this moment and the constitutional document [...]
These are the rules. Learn them. Follow them. Ignore them at your peril. There will be a test. It is called life. You do not create wealth by taxation. Taxation just takes wealth away from some and gives it to others. Redistribution is not creation. You get more of what you subsidize and less of [...]
Attorney General Eric Holder Eric Holder, the Attorney General who brought us, among other things, the Fast and Furious gun-running debacle, along with its cover up, and a sneering rejection of Congress for finding him in contempt, has struck another blow against the rule of law. Holder has decided that he does not [...]
Though it has been obvious to discerning observers for a considerable period that the United States is moving at an accelerating pace from constitutionalism toward arbitrary power, the vast majority of Americans have been slow to recognize that a crisis of governance exists. Much of the reason, I think, is that entire structures of understanding [...]