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Pillar

Politics & Law

The third pillar of a decent society is a just system of politics and law. Such a government does not bind all persons, families, institutions of civil society, and actors in the marketplace to itself as subservient features of an all-pervading authority. Instead, it honors and protects the inherent equal dignity of all persons, safeguards the family as the primary school of virtue, and seeks justice through the rule of law.

The Accused in This Republic 

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Public Discourse

The Troubling Stakes of the Originalism-Living Constitutionalism Debate

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Any defense of constitutional originalism depends on accepting the principles of natural law and natural rights on which the Constitution was founded. Unfortunately, these principles no longer have meaning for most judges, politicians, and ordinary citizens today—which has troubling implications for the future of our republic.
Public Discourse

Why Trump Persists

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No amount of lecturing about principles will persuade voters who think that their interests are under assault—and that Trump is the only candidate taking their interests seriously.
Public Discourse

The Politics of Passion: A Lesson from The Federalist Papers

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In an era when Americans seek political leaders who display “authenticity” rather than prudence, a look back to the Federalist Papers makes clear the importance of a politics based on moderation rather than passion.
Public Discourse

Who Knew Honesty Could Work? On Donald Trump and Barton Swaim

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In a political climate saturated with insincerity and cynicism, Donald Trump’s unfiltered candor—however abrasive—seems like a welcome relief. But the problems with our modern political climate begin with our own unrealistic expectation that politicians care about every facet of our daily lives.
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

Scalia at St. Thomas: Closing Arguments

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A man of deep faith and scintillating reason, Justice Scalia had an extraordinary ability to notice obvious, important truths that many overlooked. His informal remarks a few months before his death give insight into his intellect and character.
Public Discourse

Antonin Scalia: An American Originalist

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With the death of Antonin Gregory Scalia the nation has lost one of its greatest jurists and a man who embodied the principle of fidelity to the Constitution.
Public Discourse

A Catechesis for the Tolerant

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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.
Public Discourse

European Resistance to Cultural Suicide

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Across Europe citizens are fighting back to protect faith, family, and freedom.
Public Discourse

Justice Brandeis and the Birth of Liberal Judicial Activism

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The roots of today’s judicial activism stretch back one hundred years to the appointment of controversial Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a champion of “sociological jurisprudence.”
Public Discourse

Corporate Personhood and Individual Rights: A Reply to S. Adam Seagrave

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The truth that human beings possess a natural personhood and natural rights is not incompatible with the idea of corporate personhood and rights that exist not by nature but by convention.
Public Discourse

Goodnight, Vienna: What’s Wrong with Saying That Corporations Are People

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Corporations, and civic associations in general, are necessary bulwarks between governmental power and individual citizens—but they’re not people. Now more than ever, we must recover a clear understanding of what it means to be a human person with inherent dignity and natural rights.
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

The Living Constitution Revisited

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Justice William Brennan’s vision of a living constitution continues to dominate contemporary constitutional interpretation, in spite of its troubling inconsistencies.
Public Discourse

The UN’s Push for “Same-Sex Marriage”

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In direct opposition to international law, both the central UN bureaucracy and individual Member States are aggressively promoting same-sex marriage worldwide.
Public Discourse

Conscience, Obamacare Mandates, and Sex-Reassignment Therapies

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No American should be forced to violate his or her moral and religious beliefs, especially when it comes to morally fraught issues in health care.
Public Discourse

Liberty and SOGI Laws: An Impossible and Unsustainable “Compromise”

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Big Business and Big Law are using Big Government to impose their cultural values on small businesses and ordinary Americans. Indiana does not need to create new laws on sexual orientation or gender identity for people who identify as sexual minorities to be treated justly. The best way to protect all Hoosiers is for Indiana not to adopt a SOGI policy at all.
Public Discourse

Immigration, Citizenship, and Cosmopolitanism

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Traditions, duties, and ideals cannot exist without attachment to particular communities—a man can love his neighbors or his nation, but he cannot love an abstraction like humanity.
Public Discourse

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
Public Discourse

Christmas and Western Civilization

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Though Christmas is a religious holiday, secularists should appreciate its great contribution to Western Civilization: the lesson that all men are equal in their fundamental human dignity.
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

Europe, Multiculturalism, and Nihilism

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Europe can only emerge from its downward spiral by putting religious faith and respect for history and tradition at the center of our communal and personal lives.
Public Discourse

Donald Trump: At Home in Postmodern America

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Donald Trump is not a conservative—he’s a reality TV star thoroughly in tune with the passions and dynamics of mass publicity and social media. No matter how much he denounces them, he’s still a product of victim-based identity politics.
Public Discourse

Corporations are People, Too

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The contemporary left’s extreme anti-corporation position is hostile to the traditional legal culture of American liberty, which advances the common good by protecting the rights of both individuals and formally organized groups of people.

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