Join us for this episode as Professor Robert Luther anticipates judicial nomination selection in Trump's second term. Professor Luther asks two types of questions: formally, "How will the Senate composition impact Judicial Nominations?" "How many seats will be open to fill? Will blue slips still apply for district courts?" "Will any circuit seats be moved to different states?" and substantively, "What types of judges will President Trump nominate and how will this differ from his last term?" Rob...
Aug 14, 2025•40 min
As a loose tie in to the launch of our sister podcast, Natural Law Moment , we could not think of a better guest to have on the Anchoring Truths Podcast than Dennis Wieboldt , the author of a new article forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy titled "Our Natural Law Moment(s).” The article argues that in the last 100 years, American law has experienced two other Natural Law Moments before today. We explore what today’s moment, the third Natural Law Moment in Mr. Wiebold...
Jul 31, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Join us for this special episode featuring Judge Janice Rogers Brown (U.S. Circuit Court for D.C, ret.). Her remarks, given in 2023 as she received the James Wilson Leadership & the Law Award, comment on the need for judicial courage and fortitude, especially for those who take the Natural Law seriously.
Jul 10, 2025•44 min
What are the pre-political grounds of property rights? What are the just uses of property according to natural rights and the natural law? In this Anchoring Truths Podcast episode, Prof. Eric Claeys, presents his research on these questions inspired by his new book Natural Property Right s . Claeys, discusses the ways a natural right to property is justified and limited, drawing on sources from ancient, medieval and contemporary analytic philosophy. Claeys also describes the history of how a nat...
Jun 26, 2025•47 min
In the pantheon of intellectual giants of modernconservatism, standing first among equals is the late professor Harry Jaffa. Jaffa, who influenced generations of students from his academic perch at Claremont Graduate University, might have been the 20th century’s greatest scholar on the thought of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa, who along with JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes was a student of the great Leo Strauss, produced two seminal books on Lincoln. First, in 1958, he gave us Crisis of the...
Jun 12, 2025•51 min
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 abortion rights in their states, confirmed that overturning the Roe and Caseyregime would not by itself c...
May 29, 2025•54 min
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 Trump to enjoin, or stop, his administration’s policies from being carried into full effect. The Supr...
May 13, 2025•43 min
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 this perspective within legal academia. Julia D. Mahoney teaches courses in property, government financ...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 2 min
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 Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now from Encounter Books. Mahoney is a professor emeritus at Assumption Univ...
Apr 17, 2025•1 hr
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." Snedeker and Osborne offer observations about their visit to Ann Arbor as well as examine recent legal f...
Apr 03, 2025•35 min
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 people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland demands a distinctly realist foreign p...
Mar 20, 2025•52 min
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 Hungary Foundation, where he is spending a year living in Budapest. We were eager to hear about Dan...
Mar 13, 2025•44 min
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 new approach to postconviction Habeas Corpus--one that offers a more luminous beacon to guide lawye...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 1 min
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 debates about the future of pro-life politics. Joining us to discuss these subjects is our friend St...
Feb 20, 2025•27 min
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 begin signing these Executive Orders (or EOs). This relatively unprecedented practice of drawing att...
Feb 13, 2025•31 min
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 lecture he delivered to the James Wilson Institute and the Center on Religion Culture & Democracy in ...
Feb 06, 2025•46 min
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 liberals such as John Rawls, what the American Founders correctly identified about the origins of right...
Jan 30, 2025•48 min
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 rights with their derivative (and competing) accounts of women's rights: the early modern (autonomy) accoun...
Jan 23, 2025•48 min
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 listen. Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Pr...
Jan 16, 2025•46 min
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 story through virtually all important legal and policy events of the 1980s, many of which continue to sh...
Dec 19, 2024•47 min
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, University of Edinburgh) is a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), where he writes ...
Dec 12, 2024•55 min
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 to abortion, but through the First Amendment’s two religion clauses. They argue that state laws that ...
Dec 05, 2024•50 min
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 new administration and a forthcoming change in leadership for the Society, and the happy presence o...
Nov 21, 2024•27 min
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 allied groups and with federal and state lawmakers. Schweppe is an alumnus of the Claremont Institute’s ...
Nov 14, 2024•41 min
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 understanding of crime and punishment might provide a just solution; particularly in light of the mor...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 1 min
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 capacity magazines." The panel ruled the city’s ten-round limit for magazines fit within the nation’s hist...
Oct 31, 2024•35 min
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 exploration of one of the most overlooked forces shaping the political landscape today: the rapid decline o...
Oct 24, 2024•42 min
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 liberal arts college in Savannah and as a trustee of New College of Florida.
Oct 17, 2024•22 min
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 scientific understanding of the material world has made mastery of it and determinism the reigning orthodoxy....
Oct 10, 2024•37 min
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.
Oct 03, 2024•27 min
