Ryan Anderson Subscribe

Ryan T. Anderson is the the Editor of Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good.

February 25, 2013|California's Proposition 8, Conjugal Marriage, Defense of Marriage Act, Same Sex Marriage, What is Marriage?

What is Marriage?

by Ryan Anderson|

The Supreme Court will soon pronounce upon the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which amended that state's constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act that was enacted into law in 1996 under then President Bill Clinton. This conversation with Ryan Anderson, co-author with Sherif Girgis and Robert George of the recently published What is Marriage?, engages the philosophical argument that there is a natural form to marriage which has been instantiated by the western legal tradition in various ways. This lively conversation debates the most basic questions on this subject in a serious and respectful…

November 25, 2012|Brian Leiter, Conscience, Establishment Clause, First Amendment, Religious Liberty, Why Tolerate Religion

A Leiter Case for the Superfluousness of Religious Liberty

by Ryan Anderson|

In Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter, author of the Leiter Reports blog and a law professor at the University of Chicago who has an interest in philosophy, asks why Western democracies have sought to promote and protect religion—and religious liberty—in both law and culture. He explores this question because he’s puzzled by it. As he sees things, “no one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument for tolerating religion qua religion … why, as a matter of moral principle, we ought to accord special legal and moral treatment to religious practices” (emphases throughout are original). He argues that there…

August 10, 2012|Big Government, Civil Society, Market Economy, Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy

Free Market Economy v. Free Market Society

by Ryan Anderson|

Should there be markets in everything? In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare, the sharpest analysts pointed out that Chief Justice John Roberts’ interpretation of the individual mandate as a tax (rather than a fine or penalty) undercut the fiscal logic of this approach to healthcare reform. Defenders of Obamacare had been appealing to “behavioral economics,” arguing that because Americans are a law-abiding people, we would comply with the individual mandate not because the penalty was so high that it made economic sense to purchase a plan, but because our sense of citizenship makes us averse to violating…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

Ryan Anderson Subscribe

About