Robert H. Bork

Within the next two or three years, the Supreme Court will almost certainly climax a series of state court rulings by creating a national constitutional right to homosexual marriage. The Court’s ongoing campaign to normalize homosexuality—creating for homosexuals constitutional rights to . . . . Continue Reading »

Nathan Schlueter Readers of First Things should by now be well-acquainted with the heated national debate-in part inspired by these very pages-over the role and legitimacy of the modern Supreme Court, armed with the power of judicial review, in a country that proclaims itself to be self-governing. . . . . Continue Reading »

At the end of this past term, the Supreme Court produced mixed results, but the results were mostly bad from a conservative point of view. And that is the way we must judge the Court these days, not in terms of constitutional reasoning, but in terms of ideology and politics, for that is all the . . . . Continue Reading »

It is of course the case that only God knows what will happen in the next century and the next millennium. But we human beings are created with an irrepressible disposition toward the future, as well as a capacity to recall the past. In the last year we published a “millennium series” of . . . . Continue Reading »

The continuing contemporary interest in Thomas More (1478–1535) is hardly to be accounted for by popular fascination with sixteenth-century English politics or even by admiration for a martyr to a religious cause no longer universally popular. It is more likely that More’s memory remains fresh . . . . Continue Reading »

Judging from the evidence, Americans do not view human life as sacrosanct. We engage in a variety of activities, from driving automobiles to constructing buildings, that we know will cause deaths. But the deliberate taking of the life of an individual has never been regarded as a matter of moral . . . . Continue Reading »

This last term of the Supreme Court brought home to us with fresh clarity what it means to be ruled by an oligarchy. The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control. Only Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas . . . . Continue Reading »

What began to concern me more and more were theclear signs of rot and decadence germinating within Americansociety-a rot and decadence that was no longer theconsequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda ofcontemporary liberalism . . . . Sector after sector ofAmerican life has been ruthlessly . . . . Continue Reading »

Political Liberalism by John Rawls Columbia University Press, 401 pages, $29.95 Americans are justifiably anxious about the stability of their society and its institutions. Almost forty years after Brown v. Board of Education and almost thirty after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting . . . . Continue Reading »

The March issue of First Things featured an essay by Robert H. Bork, “Natural Law and the Constitution.” In that essay, Judge Bork responded to criticisms of his views on the topic by Hadley Arkes, Russell Hittinger, and William Bentley Ball. Because of the significance of the subject, . . . . Continue Reading »