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Matthew J. Franck

Matthew J. Franck

Matthew J. Franck is Contributing Editor of Public Discourse. He is also a retired Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, where he chaired the department and taught courses in political philosophy, constitutional law, and American politics.

Franck has written, edited, or contributed to books published by the University Press of Kansas, Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, and has published articles and reviews in American Political Thought, the Review of Politics, the Journal of Church and State, the Catholic Social Science Review, National Affairs, The New Atlantis, First Things, the Weekly Standard, Touchstone, the Claremont Review of Books, National Review, and Public Discourse. On Twitter he is @MatthewJFranck.

Antonin Scalia, Republican Schoolmaster

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Love of country and love of the Constitution—a simple and pure patriotism matched with a sophisticated historical sensibility—run through a new collection of Justice Antonin Scalia’s speeches.

Understanding the Election: The How and the Why of 2016

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Political scientists James W. Ceaser, Andrew E. Busch, and John J. Pitney, Jr., take a hard look at the 2016 election, adding another book to their series of insightful election analyses.

Paving a Playground, and Weeding the Unruly Garden of Religious Liberty

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This week’s 7-2 decision in favor of Trinity Lutheran Church goes a long way toward restoring order to the Supreme Court’s religious liberty jurisprudence.

Recovering a More Complex Story of the Christian West

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Nick Spencer’s recent collection of essays reminds us to appreciate the complex relationship between Christianity and modernity.

Kermit Gosnell and the Ideology of Abortion on Demand

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If this butcher could carry on virtually in the open for so many years—if he could even be permitted one more “procedure” before police on the scene put an end to his sordid business—how many other clinics like his are there?

Declaring Equality Without Supplying Its Ground: Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration

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Our fundamental equality as rational created beings is the source of our inalienable rights. Failure to understand this makes it impossible to truly understand the Declaration or the principles of limited government.

A Vote’s Consequences and a Voter’s Conscience

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Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoever—except the shape of your own character.

A Philosopher’s Defense of the Reasoning Believer

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An excellent new book, written with admirable clarity, demonstrates the compatibility—indeed the happy and mutually fulfilling companionship—of faith and reason, even and especially in matters of public life.

Stephen Douglas and Donald Trump’s America: Lessons from Lincoln

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Seeing in our contemporary politics the revival of Douglas Democracy in all its anxieties about freedom—and seeing it make such headway in Lincoln’s political party—is disheartening in the extreme. The imperative of learning from Lincoln, as Allen Guelzo’s work brings him to us, has never been stronger.

The Evolving HHS Mandate: A Play in Three Acts (So Far)

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A play in three acts, each consisting of a meeting between the CEO of a religious charity and the agent representing her health insurance company.

Antonin Scalia, Persistent Champion of Constitutional Republicanism

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The students of Justice Scalia were not merely those who took his classes or served as his clerks. Through his opinions, he taught countless others the importance of the rule of law, republican self-government, and the virtue of courageous persistence in a good cause.
Public Discourse

Presidential Elections, Party Establishments, and Demagogues

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The American Founders created a careful system to prevent the election of the power-hungry. Progressive-led changes to the electoral process in the twentieth century, however, make it all too easy for ambitious demagogues to seize control—as first Obama did, and now Trump is doing to far worse ends.
Public Discourse

Don’t Eliminate the Filibuster–Restore and Reform It

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With a simple change, the Senate can restore its republican bona fides, give minority points of view an audible voice, greatly reduce the number of filibusters, make incremental gains in the passage of bills important to the majority, and improve the quality of debate.
Public Discourse

Due Process and the Logic of the Law: A Response to Hadley Arkes

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To properly understand due process, we must grasp the key distinctions between law and decrees and between law and morality. If judges are authoritative arbiters of the “logic of morals,” we have subjected ourselves to an unelected, life-tenured legal elite whose reach exceeds our grasp.
Public Discourse

The HHS Mandate: The Legal Argument that Should Prevail at the Supreme Court

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The Eighth Circuit Court has created the opportunity for religious freedom to win again in the Supreme Court. But it is Judge Daniel Manion of the Seventh Circuit Court who supplies the arguments that should triumph, for everyone’s freedom.
Public Discourse

The Unreasonableness of Secular Public Reason

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When voters and legislators act on religiously informed moral convictions in making the law, it may entail a blending of religion and politics that is disquieting to the secular liberal mind, but it closes no gap in the “separation of church and state.”
Public Discourse

Thanks for Everything, Justice Kennedy

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As a legal opinion, Obergefell is an utter failure, relying as it does on a tenuous and historically ungrounded jurisprudence of “dignity.” The debate over same-sex marriage is not over. A constitutional ruling so shoddily reasoned, so completely and easily dismantled by the dissents, must paper over a cause that cannot ultimately win in an open debate.
Public Discourse

Professor Paulsen and Justice Scalia: A Qualified Defense of the Smith Decision

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There are some problems in the reasoning of Justice Scalia’s opinion in the 1990 religious freedom case. But in its holding, and in its rejection of a quarter century of jurisprudence that could not be squared with the First Amendment, the judgment was correct.
Public Discourse

Abraham Lincoln as Plutarch Might Have Seen Him

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Thanks to its sympathy and its moral seriousness, Richard Brookhiser’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln is a fine study of statesmanship.
Public Discourse

The Beauty of the Country of Marriage

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In a brave new book, Anthony Esolen describes the very real consequences of redefining marriage.
Public Discourse

After Hobby Lobby, the Struggle for Religious Freedom Continues

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According to the structure of the Court’s logic, all objecting employers should receive the same religious freedom protection given to churches and religious orders.
Public Discourse

What’s Wrong is Right: A Revolution in Rationalization

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Today, we face a movement to accomplish on a societal level what those who embrace morally condemned behavior have always sought as individuals: rationalization.
Public Discourse

Declaration Man: How Justice Clarence Thomas Earned His Enemies

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For Justice Clarence Thomas, the foundation of all our law lies in the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, beginning with human equality.
Public Discourse

Same-Sex Marriage Makes Liberal Judges Irrational

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A New Jersey judge’s contorted and nonsensical decision that the state is responsible for the federal government’s failure to recognize same-sex marriage highlights the irrationality that permeates the campaign for “marriage equality.”
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