When President Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas to a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court, liberals opposed to confirming the nomination at first directed critical scrutiny to statements the nominee had made in favor of employing “natural law” in constitutional interpretation. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Herbert Grover is the increasingly visible state superintendent of public instruction for Wisconsin and a man determined that no tax dollar shall be soiled by the hand of a parent on its way to school. The superintendent has fought vigorously against educational choice and is back in the papers with . . . . Continue Reading »
Awell-known account of creativity sets the scene for a celebrated act of creation, and a bleak scene it was: “In the beginning … the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the abyss.” On that occasion, creativity consisted in bringing something out of . . . . Continue Reading »
Roe v. Wade is clearly in for substantial pruning—possibly even an outright overruling—in the near future. Thus the ball, so to speak, will be in the pro-life court. As James Davison Hunter’s article in this issue reminds us, Americans do not accept the positions of either the . . . . 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 »
Religious freedom is worth protecting despite the . . . . Continue Reading »
The history books tell us that Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who shot and killed Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 at Sarajevo, started World War I by providing the occasion, or excuse, for the release of long-smoldering political tensions and ambitions. Thus can small trickles . . . . Continue Reading »
I remember one of those 2:00 A.M. college bull sessions that gave a much younger me the beginnings of an education. On that night, we were arguing about Catholicism in Western Civilization: a force for good or evil? One roommate—predictably the son of an angrily lapsed Catholic—pointed . . . . Continue Reading »
The suggestion has been made on occasion in these pages that Americans are engaged in a Kulturkampf, a contest over the role of common American moral intuitions in contributing to fundamental understandings of what kind of society we wish to be. There are few signs of any such struggle, however, in . . . . Continue Reading »
No one should be surprised that decisions of great constitutional moment are sometimes occasioned by cases that seem trivial or exotic. Those who are threatened by the majority sentiment of the moment appeal to the Constitution, although not always successfully. There was, for instance, the 1879 . . . . Continue Reading »
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