Despite Andrew Koppelman’s good-faith efforts, he has not accurately stated important, fundamental convictions of religious liberty proponents concerning the character of moral reasoning and the nature of law.
Author: Adam J. MacLeod (Adam J. MacLeod)
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Suing for Peace in the Wedding Vendor Wars
Andrew Koppelman surely is correct that a same-sex couple must find it humiliating and embarrassing to be turned away from a wedding vendor. He is also right that the costs of using public law to remedy such indignities are significant, especially for the conscientious owners whose livelihoods are at stake. So, what to do? What we need is an institution that is capable of resolving these fraught disputes on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, the common law provides such institutions.
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Natural Law for a Lawless People
Hobbes’ thin conception of natural law cannot sustain all the activities of a fully flourishing community, but it does appeal to those who live in fear of losing their basic security. Many people are possessed by that fear today, as many were in Hobbes’ time. But we have much to lose if the Hobbesian view of law prevails.
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What We’ll Learn about Civil Society, Family, and Technology from Coronavirus
No one can say with precision how many people this virus will infect or kill. Predictions are difficult. But we know some things about ourselves, so we can venture to say what this unusual moment will reveal about us.
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Essences or Intersectionality: Understanding Why We Can’t Understand Each Other
A major source of political division in America is the difference between those who believe in essences and those who follow intersectionality. Those who hold theories of intersectionality believe that human identity and much of reality itself is a construct that they can revise, not an objective reality that we can all know. This limits the possibility of political discourse: we cannot reason together if one side no longer believes in the capacity of reason to discern what is true.
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Piracy, Protests, and the Problem of China
America’s relations with China should proceed from the recognition that the Chinese government is lawless. China flouts the rule of law, not occasionally or incidentally but characteristically, because the government understands itself as the source of law and unconstrained by it. The problem of China reminds us of the deeper laws that all nations must respect and that determine whether or not our positive laws are legally just.
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Toward a Productive Discussion About Immigration
Among the universal, fundamental rights every person enjoys is the right to leave his nation of origin. Yet the right to leave does not entail the right to enter a specific nation.
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A Case of Stolen Jurisprudence in Kansas
Kansas’s Supreme Court randomly festooned its recent decision on abortion with impressive terms, without making the slightest effort to learn the terms’ meanings. The court identifies “common law” with judicial opinions and thus shoehorns innovative judicial decisions into its discussion of “natural rights.”
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No, Legislatures Cannot Abolish Marriage
Common-law marriage can never entirely be abolished. The duties of marital relations are generated and vested by the actions of the parties themselves.
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Our Universal and Particular Constitution
Understood as an expression of the common law commitments on which it was built, our Constitution still supplies common terms in which we might re-transform our civic discourse into something rational and productive. The second in a two-part series.
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The Thousands-Year Old Constitution
Our Constitution is not just positive law, stipulated and contingent on political will. American constitutions do incorporate pre-positive law, often expressly. And that law is neither mere text, nor axioms, nor political ideals. The first in a two-part series.
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How Legislatures Can Combat the Problem of Judicial Supremacy and Protect Human Rights
Though Legislated Rights is primarily written for legal philosophers, it bears important lessons for all who work to secure human rights in law. It challenges conventional views about the supremacy of courts in specifying and vindicating rights, arguing that legislatures can best accomplish this task.
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Racism, the Legacy Museum, and the Costs of Self-Deception
When we lie to ourselves about the moral status of other human beings, we not only unjustly injure other people, we also injure ourselves and our culture. We transform ourselves into a people who believe the lie. The costs of self-deception are internal and reflexive as well as external and consequential.
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Why Judge Kavanaugh’s Religion Should Be an Issue
Though our political institutions are designed to be secular and non-sectarian, our laws rest on Christian ideas about what we owe each other as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.
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Masterpiece, Marriage, and Bigotry: The Court’s Ruling Is More Robust than Many Acknowledge
State officials and judges cannot comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece simply by articulating facially neutral reasons for decisions that punish people for acting on the understanding that marriage is a man-woman union.
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California’s New Sexual Orientation Bill Is Bad, but It Wouldn’t Ban Books
Social conservatives are right to oppose proposed legislation that would ban therapy to help those experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction or gender identity confusion. But they’re wrong to say that the bill would ban books.
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The New States’ Rights: Is Parenthood Defined by Biology or Government?
Same-sex parenting advocates are calling on states’ rights to define the legal relationship between parent and child. What they seek is the power to write the record of a child’s origins and to determine a fundamental aspect of a child’s identity.
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Equal Property Rights for All, Including Christian Wedding Cake Bakers
Just as governors, abortionists, and sexual-identity activists enjoy legal protection for their property rights, so do religious business owners.
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The Impoverishment of Law and the Loss of Ordered Liberty
In their new book, Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis make a strong case for pluralism and ordered liberty, while John Corvino drafts a blueprint for a comprehensive despotism that would consume the preconditions and legal safeguards for ordered liberty. Part two of a two-part review essay.
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Debating Liberty: Why You Should Read the New Book by John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sherif Girgis
The implications of John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, Sherif Girgis’s well-argued debate reach far beyond the latest round in the culture wars. They go to the foundations of the American experiment in ordered liberty. Part one of a two-part review essay.
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Kuyper and Pope Leo as Christian Thinkers
A new book highlights the shared anthropology and social thought of Abraham Kuyper and Pope Leo XIII without glossing over their differences.
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Legal Fictions Matter: A Reply to S. Adam Seagrave
Capitalism enables equalities of participation that would not otherwise be possible, even as it facilitates inequalities of wealth.
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(Natural) Law Matters
A new book demonstrates both the promise and the limitations of natural law by examining the great European-civilian and Anglo-American legal traditions in which it plays a foundational role.
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That Time I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into the Constitutional Trial of the Century
Laws that give municipal officials and their private contractors power to issue tickets via traffic cameras confer powers of both criminal and civil law while excusing them from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law.
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Banking on the Margins or the Core of Human Flourishing?
Samuel Gregg’s new book makes it clear that the fundamental purpose of finance, as of all civic practices and institutions, is the good of human beings.