Wieboldt on Ideas With)out) Consequences?: The Natural Law Institute and the Making of Conservative Constitutionalism

Dennis J. Wieboldt, III, University of Notre Dame, is publishing Ideas With(out) Consequences?: The Natural Law Institute and the Making of Conservative Constitutionalism During the Cold War, 1947-1951 in volume 42 of the Law & History Review. Here is the abstract.

Recent scholarship on conservative constitutionalism in the United States focuses near exclusively on the development of originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation. Before conservatives turned to originalism to counter the perceived threats of an activist judiciary in the 1980s, however, this article demonstrates that conservatives employed a very different interpretive philosophy to counter a very different perceived threat. To do so, this article reconstructs the history of a conservative legal movement that predated "the" conservative legal movement. Indeed, this article uncovers how conservatives employed natural law philosophy to respond to the elite legal academy's seemingly morally foundationless positivism during the Cold War. The network of natural lawyers that sustained this earlier movement was deeply indebted to the Natural Law Institute (NLI), an academic initiative of the University of Notre Dame established in 1947. By framing the founding fathers' natural law philosophy as a bulwark of individual liberty against the encroachments of legal realists, World War II-era totalitarians, and Cold War communists, the NLI created what the political scientist Amanda Hollis-Brusky has termed a "political epistemic network." In concluding, this article suggests that recovering the history of the NLI's epistemic network reveals the importance of natural law to the making of conservative constitutionalism during the Cold War.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Birkbeck Centre for Law and the Humanities Seminar with Professor William MacNeil December 10, 2025

From Professor Patrick Hanafin, Professor of Law, Director Postgraduate Taught Programmes, Director LLM Law, Co-Director Centre for Law and the Humanities, Birkbeck Law School, University of London

The next Birkbeck Centre for Law and the Humanities event will be a Seminar with Professor Bill MacNeil (University of Queensland) and Visiting Professor in Birkbeck Law School.

The title of the seminar is Under His Eye: Feminine In/Visibilities in the Handmaid's Tale.

The event will take place on Wednesday 10 December next at 1pm in Birkbeck Central Room 406.

More information here.

Ryu and Sewell on The Hart-Dworkin Debate

Angelo Ryu and Trenton Sewell, both of the University of Oxford, have published The Hart-Dworkin Debate.

This encyclopedia entry discusses the Hart-Dworkin debate, understood as the literature developed around the viability of Hartian positivism in light of the arguments Dworkin either laid out or inspired. The focus is on two arguments: the argument from principles and the argument from theoretical disagreement. First, can Hart adequately account for the role of principles in law? The entry considers three variants of this argument. Second, can Hart adequately account for the existence of law in practices whose officials disagree on why certain empirical facts make a given legal proposition true? The entry considers both semantic and non-semantic variants of this argument.

Download the entry from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Cervone on Sworn Bond in Tudor England: Oaths, Vows and Covenants in Civil Life and Literature

 ICYMI:

Thea Cervone, Sworn Bond in Tudor England: Oaths, Vows and Covenants in Civil Life and Literature (McFarland Publishing, 2011). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

 

The swearing of oaths is a cultural phenomenon that pervades English history and was remarkably important during the sixteenth century. This multi-disciplinary work explores how writers of the Tudor era addressed the subject in response to the profound changes of the Reformation and the creative explosion of the Elizabethan period. Topics include how the art of rhetoric was deployed in polemic, the way in which oaths formed bonds between Church and State, and how oaths functioned in literature, as ceremony and as a language England used to describe itself during times of radical change.