JWI Presents: Anchoring Truths Podcast

Could it possibly be the best of times as well as the worst of times for the pro-life movement? This has been a topic we have visited before on this show. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case, immediate celebration met the harsh realities of how divided the country remains on abortion. The political reaction to the Dobbs decision, with Blue States in particular enshrining abort...

Can one federal district court judge, even temporarily, be more powerful than the President of the United States? That’s the issue at the heart of the critical debate over the legal remedy known as the nationwide injunction. The deployment of this legal remedy by federal district court judges has increased significantly in the past ten years, most acutely though during the presidencies of Donald T...

For a special episode of the Anchoring Truths Podcast, we bring you a presentation featuring Prof. Julia Mahoney of the University of Virginia School of Law. Prof. Mahoney examines how the Classical Legal Tradition has been making a return in American law. She discusses some recent opinions that provide a hopeful opportunity for its return to legal practice and describes the rising interest in thi...

Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for an episode featuring a scholar quite near and dear to us at the James Wilson Institute, Daniel Mahoney. Mahoney is an affiliated scholar with the James Wilson Institute, and with his latest book he applies his gift of prose to perhaps our most pertinent cultural issue, the rise and possible fall of wokism with The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, The Totali...

Join Anchoring Truths Podcast hosts Garrett Snedeker & Daniel Osborne for a discussion of bringing Congress back to the center of our legal and political life. The backdrop for their discussion was their visit to the University of Michigan Law School in March for the annual Federalist Society Student Symposium. This year, the Symposium was titled "Congress: Reviving the Impetuous Vortex.&...

Josh Hammer returns to the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of his first book Israel The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West . The book is a powerful, next-generation manifesto declaring that the future prosperity and ultimate fate of Western civilization is dependent upon the security and thriving of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel — that the Jewish peo...

We’re pleased to have as our guest Daniel Whitehead. Daniel was a 2022 James Wilson Fellow. He served in the General Counsel’s Office of Governor Ron DeSantis and has clerked on two federal courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. He was also a John Marshall Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the...

As part of our ongoing webinar series between the James Wilson Institute and the Center on Religion, Culture, and Democracy, Professor William Kamin discusses the debates over Federal post-conviction Habeas Corpus. Whether one looks towards the Judicial Right or the Judicial Left, there are serious issues plaguing both perspectives on this topic. Professor Kamin offers an in-depth explanation on a...

Blink and you may have missed it. President Trumpsigned into law another executive order, this one touching on a significant concern for pro-life Americans: in-vitro fertilization. The President’s latest EO reinserts us back into a debate over what legal protections should be afforded to embryos and the attendant public policy ramifications. But this debate goes even beyond the President’s EO, to...

The opening weeks of the Trump presidency have featured a flurry of Executive Orders aimed not only to reverse the policies and priorities of the Biden Administration but also to advance the Trump administration’s vision of the good. Indeed, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration he placed himself in the middle of the Capital One Arena indowntown DC before a giant rally of his supporters to...

Alex MacDonald , a DC-based labor lawyer, touches on the historical roots of the right to work, the right’s connection with natural-law principles, and its return to modern jurisprudence. Informed by JWI Co-Director Hadley Arkes's Mere Natural Law , Alex examines how that return could transform modern labor law, especially the concept of exclusive representation. This episode, adapted from a l...

For the latest Anchoring Truths Podcast, JWI Affiliated Scholar Paul DeHart joins for a fascinating in-depth discussion on themes from his latest book, The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent . DeHart is a distinguished professor of political science at Texas State University. Topics include the limits of the consent of the governed, philosophic errors of modern lib...

This episode features a webinar discussion on Natural Law and Women's Rights with Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar and current fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This webinar was part of our ongoing series of legal education webinars with the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Erika Bachiochi examines, both philosophically and historically, two competing accounts of rig...

Returning Anchoring Truths Podcast guest Ilya Shapiro has written a new book Lawless: the Miseducation of America’s Elites that is part indictment of how the legal academy has succumbed to the worst excesses of illiberalism but also part memoir of his own experience at Georgetown Law at the hands of administrators who run the legal academy. His book is a must read, and our conversation a must list...

Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for both a look back and a look ahead for originalism. Our guest, Steven Calabresi, is the co-author of a new intellectual history “The Meese Revolution” that describes the rise of originalism, which necessitates telling the story of Ed Meese, without whom it surely does not happen. Calabresi, who was part of that history working closely with Meese, threads a stor...

Join host Garrett Snedeker for an exciting discussion with author Brad Littlejohn, Ph. D., about his new book Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. The conversation explored conflicting definitions of liberty, the issue of expressive individualism, and misperceptions of the freedom secured by the Constitution. Pre-order Called to Freedom here. Brad Littlejohn (Ph. D...

JWI Affiliated Scholar & Professor of Philosophy Frank Beckwith confronts a troubling trend among some legal scholars who, in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, have constructed and advocated for a right to abortion rooted in religious liberty. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey in Dobbs, an increasing number of scholars argue that the Constitution may still vindicate the right t...

A recap of the largest annual gathering of the Right's lawyers, the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention, is the topic of discussion this week. Garrett Snedeker joins JWI Programs Director Daniel Osborne for a high-level account of the 2024 NLC. Snedeker shares his thoughts with Osborne on the convention's theme of group identity and the law, the backdrops of the convention including a...

Who was for they/them versus who was for you? Join host Garrett Snedeker for a fascinating discussion with Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy for the American Principles Project (APP), on the power of the most influential political ads that shaped the 2024 presidential election. Jon Schweppe is the Director of Policy for APP. He advances the organization’s legislative priorities by working with alli...

JWI Co-Director Gerry Bradley delivers remarks on what he calls the tragedy of "progressive" prosecution. Since George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, the U.S. has undergone a significant reevaluation of its criminal justice system and has moved towards a more "progressive" prosecution. Professor Bradley explores the legal and societal implications of this evolution and will consider how a proper u...

We are excited to be dive into Second Amendment jurisprudence and the Natural Right to Self Defense. Our entry into that topic is collection of opinions in Hanson v. United States from a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from October 29, 2024. In that case, the majority upheld the District’s ban on the possession and sale of what it called “extra-large capaci...

Join Anchoring Truths Podcast host Garrett Snedeker and journalist Conn Carroll for an exciting discussion about Carroll's new book Sex and the Citizen and the importance of marriage. In  Sex and the Citizen , Conn Carroll shows how the assault on marriage conducted by cultural and political elites is undermining the very foundations of our democracy. Carroll's book is a powerful and urgent explor...

In this minisode, host Garrett Snedeker speaks with returning guest Mark Bauerlein about the current decline in educational quality at universities, and the challenges that technology poses to the intellectual development of youth. Mark W. Bauerlein is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and a senior editor of First Things. He also serves as a visitor of Ralston College, a start-up l...

The world is not a machine. Humanity is not a mistake. Those should not be such bold words and yet, according to this week’s guest, Spencer Klavan, they need to be repeated as often as possible today. For centuries, a grim anti-human outlook has taken hold of the public imagination, teaching us all to view ourselves as random products of a cruel and uncaring natural world. The pursuit of scientifi...

Join host Garrett Snedeker and JWI Programs Director Daniel Osborne for special look inside JWI's Law School Seminar program. Highlighting their trips to Harvard Law and Notre Dame Law, Snedeker and Osborne provide an overview of the seminars JWI hosts on campuses across the country and the impact of these seminars on law students.