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Justin Dyer

Justin Dyer is director of the Civitas Institute, professor of government, and Jack G. Taylor Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author, with Kody Cooper, of The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

From the Archives: The Pursuit of Happiness Rightly Understood

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The right to the pursuit of happiness is coherent only in the full theological context of the Declaration of Independence.
Supreme Court

Wrong Then, Wrong Now: The Fake Abortion History of Roe v. Wade

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The history put forward in abortion litigation by advocates of abortion has never been about history. By their own admission, they “fudge it as necessary,” keeping up “the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals.”

The Pursuit of Happiness Rightly Understood

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The right to the pursuit of happiness is coherent only in the full theological context of the Declaration of Independence.

Eugenics and Other Evils

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The eugenic search for good genes comes at the cost of human dignity and human equality, and leaves by the wayside the dogma of the sanctity of human life. Rather than warning us that eugenics can happen here, Thomas’s dissent lays out the case that it already has happened here, and the state has a compelling interest in preventing its return.

John Quincy Adams contra Patrick Deneen: Marriage, Family, and the Story of the American Founding

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Can we hold to the truths of the Declaration of Independence—that we are endowed by our Creator with natural rights and that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed—without undermining respect for those natural duties and natural relationships that do not depend on our consent?

What’s the Difference Between Abortion and Infanticide?

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Is an infant, marked for abortion but delivered alive, even in tragic circumstances, a person whom the law ought to protect?

Secular Materialism Can’t Make Sense of Reality

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Rumors of God’s death may have been greatly exaggerated, but the prevalence of a materialistic philosophy that cannot give an adequate account of human freedom and moral responsibility has put in jeopardy many of the core ideas at the base of our civilization. Without metaphysics we are left simply with physics, and physics is about power, leverage, and force.

Sexually Violent Predator Laws and Indefinite Confinement: Insights from C.S. Lewis

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Sexually violent predator laws permit the indefinite confinement of persons who have already served a sentence for their crime. They are a perfect example of what C.S. Lewis called the humanitarian theory of punishment, replacing punishment and desert with treatment and therapy.

Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature

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It is often alleged that the American founders lacked a unified and coherent political theory. To the contrary, a recent book by Thomas West shows that the founders broadly agreed on a philosophy of natural rights, calling for both the protection of liberty and the promotion of virtue.

The Decline of Movement Conservatism and the Rise of the Alt-Right

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Donald Trump’s election has made one thing clear: right-wing politics, conservatism, and the Republican Party are not interchangeable.
Public Discourse

Diagnosing Our American Illness

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The irony of Obama’s presidency, with its ambitious calls for “hope” and “change,” is that circumstances have assigned him the duty of presiding over the last days of the old regime. Our postwar political order, it seems, has sown the seeds of its own dissolution.
Public Discourse

Understanding the Slavery-Abortion Analogy

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In both Dred Scott and Roe, the justices of the Supreme Court had to decide what it means to be a person, whether human beings can be considered property, and what it means to be deprived of liberty. They got it wrong both times.
Public Discourse

Abortion After Tiller

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A new documentary on late-term abortion providers shows us that the abortion debate is much more about why life is valuable than about when human life begins.
Public Discourse

Stripping the Constitution

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Adam Freedman’s stark proposal in The Naked Constitution that we strip our founding document of its modern and academic glosses shows us that we need to take structural reforms to our Constitution seriously.
Public Discourse

Slavery and the Constitution

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Slavery was a great evil, but the Constitution was neither its source nor its guarantor.
Public Discourse

Do Sports Build Character?

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The recent Penn State scandal reminds us that if sports are to instill moral character, we must approach athletics first as an education in the virtues, not as an avenue to fame and wealth.
Public Discourse

Early Religious Freedom in America

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The Founders’ nuanced views of religion and politics prevent us from reading modern concerns about the separation of church and state into their words.
Public Discourse

Why America Needs Social Conservatism

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An America without social conservatism would be stripped of its conservative enlightenment roots and go the way of Europe via entitlements and centralized economic regulation.
Public Discourse

Marriage Unmoored

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Many expect that the Supreme Court will soon overturn the traditional marriage laws remaining on the books in forty-three states, a prospect that would have been unthinkable only a decade or two ago. What happened?
Public Discourse

MLK’s Philosophical and Theological Legacy

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Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused a worldview repugnant to many of those who now claim his legacy.
Public Discourse

Religious Liberty and the Ministerial Exception

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An upcoming Supreme Court decision might give government, rather than religious organizations, the final say on who counts as a religious minister.
Public Discourse

Perry, Prayer, and Politics

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Rick Perry’s prayer rally engendered accusations that he wrongly crossed the church-state divide. But great leaders in American history have long held that religion is a necessary basis for public morality.
Public Discourse

Reckoning with Roe v. Wade

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We are still reckoning with the legacy of Roe’s fraudulent jurisprudence.
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