This essay is adapted from remarks delivered in 2011 by Hadley Arkes before an audience in Washington, D.C., and serves as a kind of preview of the perspective that would come to expression in Mere Natural Law: Originalism and the Anchoring Truths of the Constitution (Regnery Gateway, 2023) We want
I look back with gratitude at the season of life that followed graduate school. These were years that found me, somewhat unexpectedly, doing criminal justice research in Washington, D.C. During this season two things occurred that changed my way of thinking forever. One was ecumenical; I refer here to the
Borrowing his title from C.S. Lewis’ monumental work, Mere Christianity, Hadley Arkes sets an ambitious goal for this book: to provide the general public a readable explanation of natural law theory and how it underlies the U.S. Constitution. To Arkes, the Constitution cannot be understood without recourse to the eternal moral
In story or song, there are few caricatures of the moral skeptic sharper than the figure drawn by Tom Stoppard, with his usual dash, in his play Jumpers. The temper of the skeptic was caught in Stoppard’s description of the man who is reluctant to concede that the train for Bristol
