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Photo of Supreme Court's exterior with pillars and ceiling

The Supreme Court Reins in the Administrative State

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Administrative rules don’t require broad consensus, so they don’t enjoy the benefits of a diverse group’s deliberations. Instead, they reflect the will of the president or administrators. It falls to the Supreme Court to defend Congress’s authority to legislate against the encroachment of the administrative state. Thankfully, the Supreme Court recently did just this in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.
flag, sun, trees

The Future of Conservatism: Community, the Common Good, and State Power

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The future of conservatism lies in building a program on political, policy, cultural, social, and educational foundations that can rebuild America from the ground up. Anything short of that will merely prolong our agony.
baby, hand, life

A Post-Roe Legislative Agenda for Congress

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In the event that Roe v. Wade is overturned this summer, pro-life legislators must act to protect human life in the womb. They should introduce legislation to recognize the personhood of the unborn, strip the ability of federal courts to hear challenges to this recognition, create a private right of action to help enforce anti-abortion policy, and use the taxing power to cripple the abortion industry.
Photo of pregnant woman

Abortion Laws across the Globe and at Home

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Given the ongoing evolution of abortion law in the United States, it makes sense to engage and evaluate the constitutions and laws of other jurisdictions. Although these sources and materials do not determine the meaning of our Constitution, they can illuminate our scientific, medical, and ethical debates. A particularly valuable resource, which explores abortion jurisprudence across a variety of legal contexts, is Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases under Scrutiny, edited by William L. Saunders and Pilar Zambrano.
Group of people on phones and laptop

Technology and the Soul: The Spiritual Lessons of Digital Distraction

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The age of digital media has unleashed a profoundly threatening human experiment. By drawing us to waste not only our time, but our attention, social media seduces us to waste our souls. Our brightest engineers have trained our most powerful technology to act with the psychological craftiness of demons. Neuroscience helps us understand how digital media is changing us, but we need a more classical language about the soul to understand, and protect ourselves from, the most ominous of these changes.
Catholic Bishop proceeding into Mass

Catholic Bishops Fail in Defending Conscience

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Several Catholic dioceses have conflated the teaching of the Church with scientific or prudential judgment about the common good during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has led many bishops to dismiss legitimate concerns about COVID vaccines felt by individuals with sensitive consciences. In so doing, these bishops ignore the Church’s teachings about the grave duty to obey one’s conscience.
Dome of the United States Capitol

Fictions and Lies in a Lawless Age

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The law must stand above the powerful, and we should worry when the law is suspended or disregarded. But where is the law to be found? Most of the law consists of important fictions which live in the minds of lawyers. But what makes the fiction plausible? And how is the law’s benefit to be assessed unless we measure it against fixed, non-conventional, non-fictional standards of justice?
Xi Jinping photo

The CCP’s Fake Democracy: How the CCP Controls China and Fools the World (Part II)

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In the first part of this essay, I showed how the CCP persecutes individuals, and discussed the CCP’s structural control of the government and the nation. In this second part, I will compare the U.S. democratic system with the CCP regime to more clearly demonstrate how one-party rule results in authoritarianism.
Chinese National Congress gathering

The CCP’s Fake Democracy: How the CCP Controls China and Fools the World (Part I)

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The CCP regularly employs violent tactics to persecute and silence its opponents and operates with impunity as a shadow power. China’s political structures enable it to maintain monolithic control of the nation. By discussing my own experience under the CCP and shedding light on its opaque structures, I hope to show that comparing the CCP’s authoritarian regime with democratic governance is like comparing barbarism with civilization: there is no comparison.
Supreme Court building

Supreme Court Nominations: A Primer to President Biden

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Public Discourse has hosted arguments about the Court since the publication’s inception. Here, from our archives, are some essays which remain timely, and which might provide some needed perspective on the role of the Court, originalism, and the role of morality and natural law in the Court.
Prague cathedral

On Tech and Dignity: How We Can Stay Human (Part II)

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The only way to avoid a posthuman future is by affirming the goodness of being human in both our personal choices and social and legal institutions. Most importantly, we should recommit to the virtue of religion: giving God His due. Religion teaches us to value the ontological goodness of our creatureliness, exhorts us to take steps to preserve it, and gives us the confidence to do so. When we’re steeped in a religious mode of being, we’re content just to be human; we have no need or desire to grasp for more.
6th century Christ Pantocrator icon

Can You Have Human Dignity without Christianity?

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When Christianity enters a society, it provides an understanding of inherent and equal human dignity that lifts up those whom that society has considered unworthy. But what happens when Christianity recedes? Christian human dignity is not founded on maximizing fairness or autonomy, but on the fact that all human beings are made free and in the image of God. If it becomes detached from that principle, then human dignity no longer makes sense.
Eberstadt

From the Archives: Mary Eberstadt on What Plagues the West

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“Post-revolutionary men and women are living in ways that are profoundly unnatural for the ineradicably social creatures that we are; and many are suffering as a result, at times without even knowing the name of what ails them. This preoccupation, and the desire to do something about it, continues to shape my work.”
Old books

Deconstructionist, Deconstruct Thyself

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The human soul is marvelously complex. Anyone who thinks he can definitively disentangle another author’s motivations—let alone his own—is fooling himself. He is engaging less in scholarly inquiry than self-projection. Only by listening attentively to others can we instruct our minds and enlarge our souls.
Candles

Maintaining Faith Amid Modern Malaise: A Conversation with Public Discourse Contributing Editor Devorah Goldman

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I think PD is doing important work in addressing modern spiritual challenges: even just acknowledging such problems from an explicitly religious perspective can hopefully get us closer to mitigating them. Both Judaism and Christianity also engender a kind of humility, as we look to the past for wisdom and acknowledge our indebtedness to those who came before us.
Map of United States

On State Powers

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Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s new book, Who Decides?, provides a powerful argument for ordinary people who feel powerless in their ability to affect the course of national politics. State constitutions provide an alternative venue for meaningful political change and are an important way to exercise constitutional self-government.
Textile workers in factor

The Bad Old Days: How Scientism and Market Logic Corroded the Family Long Before the Sexual Revolution

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American “family values” before the baby boomers and Roe v. Wade and second-wave feminism were shaped more by modern notions of industrial progress than by eternal truths about the human person. The sexual revolution emerged from axioms that had already permeated the mainstream for decades. Even among social conservatives, those axioms still shape our discourse about the family today.
Supreme Court building at dusk

Why American Jews Shouldn’t Object to Overturning Roe: Part 2

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In Part I of this article, we established that many of the reasons some Jewish Americans passionately oppose overturning of Roe v. Wade are either overblown or baseless. Today, we highlight one of the ways in which overturning Roe will help to foster a political culture of federalism and subsidiarity that benefits religious minorities.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Progressive Legal Scholars Have Long Known Roe’s Reasoning Is Calamitous

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Roe is indefensible as a matter of honest constitutional interpretation. It short-circuited the political process and poisoned the Court. Its systematic flaws, widely acknowledged by a variety of progressive and pro-choice legal scholars, caused the judiciary to become the branch most, not “least[,] dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.”

The Natural Law Thirty Years Later: Clarence Thomas’s Constitutionalism

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A functioning constitutionalism that protects the people’s rights and fosters good governance requires a sound political theory behind it. Times have changed since the American Founding, but Thomas is right that the natural law teaching in the Founders’ political theory remains as sound and useful as ever.
Boomers sitting in a park

In Defense of the Boomers

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The determination to make one’s own way in life is what marks out the difference between those who make the best of what they have and seek to improve things for themselves and others, and those who instead diminish themselves by blaming the Baby Boomers for what they don’t like about their lives.
Ohio Statehouse

Dobbs Won’t Fix State Courts. To Do That, Pro-Life Lawmakers Must Step Up Now.

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In some states, it’s almost impossible for pro-life governors to appoint originalist judges. That’s why we must pursue state-level judicial reforms before Dobbs is decided. To make the most of this opportunity, most of us need to turn our attention away from DC and toward our state capitols.
Boy waving French flag

What the French Can Teach Americans About the Electoral College

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Pitting as it does two different conceptions of popular sovereignty against each other, the debate over the Electoral College is a proxy for a more fundamental debate over what kind of regime should govern America. The history of French republicanism teaches that the closer Americans come to changing the way they elect their president, the closer they come to regime change.

Why We Opposed an Anti-Abortion Resolution at the Southern Baptist Convention

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The resolution on abortion that was passed at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville was well-intended but woefully flawed. It offers no exception for the life of the mother, and it opposes incrementalism. Those two items are serious shortcomings that would lead to the loss of more innocent lives, not fewer.
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