This is the Week of Waiting: In the final days of the term we are waiting for the Supreme Court to release decisions on some of the most vexing issues in our politics, on racial preferences, the Voting Rights Act, and above all the meaning of "marriage." Yesterday the Court administered a shock of sorts to the friends of federalism when it denied, to the people of Arizona, the rightful authority to insure that the power of voting will be shared only with fellow citizens. The Court also released yesterday a decision on the Fifth Amendment that may well be overlooked as the attention is drawn to the cases even more momentous. But Hadley Arkes argues that the case brings back the teachings of James Wilson and Thomas Reid on "natural language," and it leads to some hidden truths on "self-incrimination."

Posted on on June 18, 2013

2012 John Marshall Fellow Michael Fragoso ruminates on the lack of sufficient unity and energy in the pontifical commander-in-chief.

Posted on on May 22, 2013

Hadley Arkes has written a piece for our friends at Public Discourse arguing that we don’t need a new resolution from Congress to address the wrongs of clinics like Kermit Gosnell’s—the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act already serves that purpose, and we should restore the civil penalties originally attached to it. Check it out here.

Posted on on May 14, 2013

Hadley Arkes has a new essay that is also running in The Weekly Standard, arguing that in light of the horrors committed by Kermit Gosnell, now is the time for pro-life Congressmen to revisit the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act and clear away the obstacle to its enforcement. We have reprinted his essay here as well.

Posted on on April 29, 2013

Hadley Arkes has a new essay at The Catholic Thing that we've reposted here .

Posted on on April 23, 2013

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard the second day of oral arguments on the matter of marriage, this one focused on the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (DOMA). The day before, the conservative judges seemed to be tipped to the side of preserving marriage as we know it. But the justices flew into a cloud of all of the abstractions and clichés accumulated over the years. By the end, we found the spectacle of even conservative judges acquiescing in the notion that it was somehow illegitimate for the laws to cast "moral" judgments. The exchanges pointed no clear outcome, but they did reveal a legal discourse in deep disarray. Hadley Arkes tries here to sort out the strands of argument.

Posted on on March 28, 2013

Yesterday, Hadley Arkes responded with a letter to the editor to Michael McConnell's recent editorial in the Wall St. Journal on the Defense of Marriage Act ("The Constitution and Same-Sex Marriage," March 22). Here is the full text.

Posted on on March 27, 2013

Hadley Arkes was at the Supreme Court today for the oral argument in the first of the two cases on marriage, Hollingsworth v. Perry, on Proposition 8 in California. He reports that the defenders of marriage left the courtroom today "decorously upbeat," with the sense that things were tipped to their side.  Hadley sets down here his impressions and his commentary on some of the arguments made—and missed.

Posted on on March 26, 2013

John C. Eastman responds to Michael McConnell's recent op-ed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (“The Constitution and Same Sex Marriage," March 22, 2013), in which McConnell claimed that the Court should avoid the tough constitutional questions by rendering judgment on narrow grounds, jurisdictional in the Proposition 8 case, and a clever federalism argument in the DOMA case.

Posted on on March 25, 2013

The Supreme Court, next week, will allot two days to the oral arguments in the cases on marriage. In the run-up to those arguments, some conservative writers have offered theories of federalism that work to reject the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), at issue in one of the cases. Hadley Arkes, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, warns about theories so refined that they sail serenely past the defense of marriage and the importance of marriage in the laws. Arkes was one of the architects of DOMA and led the hearings over the bill in the House Committee on the Judiciary. He seeks to remind readers here of the purpose that brought forth DOMA and the reasoning that supported that Act. In symposium fashion, we have invited responses to this piece from our John Marshall Fellows and will post their pieces as they come in. Professor Arkes will respond to those pieces once they are published.

Posted on on March 24, 2013