Natural Rights

November 13, 2019|Clarence Thomas, Corey Robin, Declaration of Independence, Marxism, Natural Rights, Originalism

A Marxist Takes a Swing and a Miss at Justice Thomas’s Jurisprudence

Justice Clarence Thomas laughs in his chambers at the Supreme Court. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

Corey Robin's Marxist ideology has led him to create a false narrative about Justice Thomas’s jurisprudence.

October 29, 2019|Dred Scott v. Sandford, Lon Fuller, Natural Law, Natural Rights, Originalism, Philip Hamburger, Russell Kirk

Originalism Is Beside the Point

by Bruce P. Frohnen|

US Supreme Court (shutterstock.com)

Most lawyers today seem to believe that they must make new law because the one they inherited was in fact fundamentally unjust.

October 7, 2019|Declaration of Independence, George Will, James Madison, Judicial Review, Natural Rights, Progressivism, Statecraft as Soulcraft, Whittaker Chambers, Woodrow Wilson

Progress of a Conservative

by Richard M. Reinsch II|

George Will at CPAC 2014 (shutterstock.com)

“The Founders intended the Constitution to promote a way of life, and they understood that to promote a way of life is to promote a kind of person.”

September 9, 2019|Alasdair MacIntyre, John Finnis, Natural Law, Natural Rights

How to Defend Limited Government and the Common Good

by Nathan W. Schlueter|

A Vindication of Politics helps us remember that there are as many kinds of common goods as there are kinds of human association.

July 5, 2019|Clint Eastwood, Declaration of Independence, Jacques Maritain, John Locke, Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights, Thomas Hobbes, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

When Exactly Did the Idea of Rights Go Off the Rails?

by Peter C. Myers|

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the opening of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sep 20, 2016 (Drop of Light/Shutterstock.com).

The present deformation of rights was not fated from the beginning, as some prominent conservatives have claimed.

December 11, 2017|Herbert Storing, John Locke, Natural Rights, Political Theory of the American Founding, the amalgam theory, Thomas G. West

A Partial Vindication of Thomas West

by James Stoner|

We are better off reviving natural rights as a useful explanation for some of our constitutional virtues, but to counteract the crisis of modernity we need to explore other explanations of our Constitution.

November 7, 2017|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Natural Law, Natural Rights, Second Amendment, Thomas Aquinas

Natural Law Is More Inspiring Than Natural Rights

by Douglas Kries|

Readers of Law and Liberty have heard—and perhaps even used—the famous phrase about free speech that is often misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” One wonders, though, whether this formulation actually makes much sense.

July 4, 2017|Declaration of Independence, morality, Natural Rights

Natural Rights and the Declaration

by Mike Rappaport|

Today is Independence Day, which brings to mind this great passage from the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new…

May 10, 2017|Grotius, Immigration, Know Nothing Party, Natural Rights