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.
Author: Adam J. MacLeod (Adam J. MacLeod)
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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.
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The Double Mommy Trap: Two Mothers and No Rights for Junior
The double maternity two-step is a forced march. The intended destination seems to be greater personal fulfillment for adults. But if we arrive there, what will be left of the rights of children?
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Texas Lawmen and the Lawless Court
The Governor and Attorney General of Texas should obey the law, not the Supreme Court’s ambiguous abstractions. They should continue to secure the fundamental liberty of vulnerable Texans and make the abortion industry assert its super-claim-rights in court.
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The Right to Be Differently Excellent: Why Christian Colleges Should Be Allowed to Be Christian
Vanderbilt is legally free to constitute itself as a non-religious university. The question is whether Gordon College will be left free to constitute itself as a Christian college. Will we have equal liberty, or only liberty for those who despise Christianity?
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Federal Courts, Government Agencies, and Transgender Bathroom Policy
A federal court has said a student’s subjective understanding alters the meaning of an unambiguous, federal law. And it alters the meaning of the law for everyone in the Gloucester County school district and, potentially, everyone who resides in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
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What’s Wrong With Rights?
Rights in the modern world are meaningless, existing only at the will of a sovereign lawmaker. A return to “perfectionist jurisprudence,” in which rights are derived from plural authorities, at least some of which are higher that the human sovereign, and constructed on genuine human goods, would restore the structural integrity and normative currency of human rights.
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A Catechesis for the Tolerant
By arguing that religion is intolerant and should not be tolerated, a new book inadvertently demonstrates that liberalism grounded in personal autonomy is the least tolerant religion of all.
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Birth Certificates, Fatherhood, and Same-Sex Marriage: Sotomayor v. Sotomayor
Which Justice Sotomayor will show up in the next landmark family-law case: the Sotomayor who affirms the “precious” rights and duties of biological parents? Or the Sotomayor who insists on full "marriage equality"?
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Did The Supreme Court Take Tennessee Courts Out of the Marriage Business?
For a trial judge, the jurisdictional implications of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision are not matters of idle speculation. They are pressing practical questions with grave consequences.
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The Ambiguous Quest for Marriage Equality
Do proponents of marriage equality want marriage equality or not? The rhetoric of marriage equality does not match the reality. Only if marriage is the union of a man and a woman does it make any sense to have paternity presumed without consent, incest and polygamy prohibited, and custody bestowed upon biological or presumed parents except for cause.