First Things RSS Feed - William J. Stuntz https://www.firstthings.com/author/william-j-stuntz en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:53:35 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/william-j-stuntz 60 Law and the Christian Story https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/12/law-and-the-christian-story https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/12/law-and-the-christian-story Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 -0500 Conservative Christians have in recent years devoted a good deal of energy and attention to criticizing lawyers and courts. Though some of the criticism seems overheated to me, a lot of it is richly deserved, and I have engaged in my share. But as we criticize, even rightly, I fear we miss something. If this is indeed our Father’s world, we should expect to see signs or hints of His ownership everywhere—small suggestions in surprising places that the Christian story is really true . These signs, when we see them, come as a delight and refreshment to believers, for the Christian story is, above all, very good news. And they present real opportunities to open the eyes of unbelievers, to give them a glimpse of the reality they have heretofore denied. All of which suggests that we should at all times have our own eyes open, that we should watch and listen for the signs.

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]]> Pride and Pessimism in the Courts https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/02/pride-and-pessimism-in-the-courts https://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/02/pride-and-pessimism-in-the-courts Sat, 01 Feb 1997 00:00:00 -0500 Legally speaking, we live in strange times. Late-twentieth-century American law has a strong libertarian streak––stronger than ever in our past and getting stronger all the time––which shows up in the law’s treatment of contentious moral topics like abortion, medical treatment for the terminally ill, divorce (though libertarianism is fading a bit here), and the contents of the local drugstore’s magazine rack. In these spheres, the reigning legal ideology is something close to laissez-faire.

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]]> When Rights Are Wrong https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/04/when-rights-are-wrong https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/04/when-rights-are-wrong Mon, 01 Apr 1996 00:00:00 -0500 It is common in some circles to say that our legal system worries too much about rights and not enough about responsibilities. The complaint is a fair one, as far as it goes. But the real problem with rights—and with what Mary Ann Glendon calls “rights talk,” a kind of talk that dominates much of our law and much of our politics—is not that we have too many or too much of them. The problem is that we have the wrong kind. In this century the type of rights our law protects has changed, and as it changed, our idea of rights changed as well. These changes affect much more than law and lawyers; they transform the way all of us, on the right or left, think about governance and citizenship.

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