Tagged: Natural Law

law

St. George Tucker and the Theology of the Common Law

Thomas Jefferson disagreed with Blackstone’s notion that “Christianity is part of the common law.” Legal jurist St. George Tucker may have provided an Enlightenment alternative to Jefferson’s notion while revising Blackstone for America.

The judge as moral philosopher

Reviewing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner’s Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts in the Claremont Review of Books, David Forte exposes Justice Scalia’s famous legal positivism as moral philosophy by another name.  “They call false,” Forte writes of Scalia and Garner, “the ‘notion that the quest in statutory interpretation is to do justice,’” and they, like Alexander Hamilton, prefer judges to be “‘bound down by strict rules and precedents.”  But judging, Forte pushes back, is […]

The Doomsday Provision

Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Guns In America. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so...

Presuppositional Constitutionalism

Does the Constitution assume certain presuppositions on the part of those it means to govern?  If so, what are those presuppositions? I submit the answer to the first question is yes, and explain the...