James Wilson Institute Podcast

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 historical tradition of regulating “particularly dangerous weapons” and those “capable of unprecedented lethality,” even though there weren’t similar bans when the Second Amendment was ratified. A dissenting opinion held that “Magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition are arms in common use for lawful purposes. Therefore, the government cannot ban them.” Joining us on the episode is the lawyer who delivered theoral argument and represented Mr. Hanson and other plaintiffs at the D.C. Circuit, Edward “Ed” Wenger.

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 of marriage. Once the cornerstone of American life, marriage has seen a dramatic fall from grace. In 1960, four out of five households were led by married couples; today, that number has plummeted to less than half, with more people choosing cohabitation over commitment. The American family, as we once knew it, is unraveling. Sex and the Citizen offers a bold vision for restoring the stability and prosperity that marriage once provided. By learning from history, we can rebuild a society where love and commitment are the

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.

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. Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Spencer's new book, tells a daring new story about how we got here, and how we can chart a better path forward. He argues that science itself is leading us not away from God but back to him, and to the ancient faith that places the human soul at the center of the universe. Spencer A. Klavan is returning guest to the Anchoring Truths Podcast. A graduate of Yale, he earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He is the author of the acclaimed book How

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.

JWI Deputy Director, Garrett Snedeker, and 2023 James Wilson Fellow Jack Kieffaber discuss the impact of impending AI developments on the judiciary. Kieffaber's new article "Predictability, AI, and Judicial Futurism: Why Robots Will Run the Law and Textualists Will Like It," forthcoming in 2025 in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, is a stirring challenge to avowed textualists. In this podcast, Kieffaber shares his predictions about the development of "Judge.AI," discusses this system's implications on the popular understanding of textualism, and expounds on the role of normative judgments in textualist inquiry. This episode has been edited since its original release.

As Constitution Day approaches, we feature a forthcoming book that tackles how far we’ve come in the Progressives’ quiet regime change over the last century, replacing our constitutional republic with rule by the administrative state. That book is American Leviathan: the birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism by Ned Ryun. Ryun is the Founder and CEO of American Majority and Voter Gravity. The son of the former congressman, Olympian, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Jim Ryun, Ned is also the author of Restoring Our Republic and The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill. A frequent commentator on Fox News, Ryun currently resides in Western Loudoun County, VA, with his wife and four children. Buy or pre-order American Leviathan here. Follow Ned Ryun on Twitter.

After the Supreme Court's blockbuster decision in Loper Bright/Relentless on administrative law, the question remains what will happen next in the effort to rein in the administrative state. Host Garrett Snedeker discusses a recent essay he wrote in which he urges close attention to the lower courts wrestling with the precedent in a post-Loper Bright future with JWI Programs Director Daniel Osborne. Read Snedeker's essay from TomKlingenstein.com here.

Join JWI Deputy Director Garrett Snedeker and Intern Catherine Hickam for a discussion with Prof. Michael Pakaluk about Natural Law and the traditional Thomistic and New Natural Law perspectives.

Guest Ben Weingarten, the Editor at Large at RealClearInvestigations, joins host Garrett Snedeker to document how public and private actors (government, academia, media, and tech) have acted to curtail our natural right to speak freely in a concerted effort that Weingarten calls "The Censorship Industrial Complex." Mr. Weingarten has also testified before Congress on this issue. They discuss the recent Supreme Court decision in Murthy v. Missouri as well as how the history of the Censorship Industrial Complex stretches back to the late 1940s. Weingarten is a Senior Contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek and The Epoch Times, and a Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party. He co-hosts the Edmund Burke Foundation’s “NatCon Squad” podcast. Ben has appeared on “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” “The Ingraham Angle,” and “The Ben Shapiro Show,” among many other programs. He is founder and CEO of Chang

For Minisode 7, host Garrett Snedeker along with JWI Program Manager Daniel Osborne offer a live update from the 2024 Summer James Wilson Fellowship for Young Lawyers. Snedeker and Osborne discuss JWI's flagship program, the lessons on law and morality taught at the Fellowship, the broader experience for young lawyers, and how the Fellowship has grown over its eleven years.

Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast team and Dr. Yuval Levin for a deep-dive into how the Constitution may unify us again. In his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again, Levin gives us a thorough analysis of both the written and unwritten constitution and why that structure that the American Founders gave us is still morally good and durable. Levin argues that we today through our institutions need to devote ourselves toward the project of recovering those habits and practices that historically have sustained our life under the Constitution. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is the author of numerous books besides American Covenant. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at New York

Listen as Joshua Turner, Chief of Constitutional Litigation and Policy for the State of Idaho and James Wilson Fellowship Alumnus, unpacks the ramifications of the Court's decision to return the case of Idaho v. United States back to the 9th Circuit, dismissing it as improvidently granted. Josh outlines some of what we may expect from this case as it progresses.

Host Garrett Snedeker and JWI intern Isaac Michael speak with Prof. Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary about his new book Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good. Professor Walker discusses his intended audience for the book, its main ideas, and his hopes for a revival of the Natural Law in American legal discussions. He also touches upon common difficulties many Protestants have with the Natural Law and makes the case for the authority of the Natural Law in Protestant moral thought. He ultimately presents a Christ-centered case for Natural Law reasoning which he sees as essential to any coherent account of a natural moral order.   Dr. Walker serves as Associate Dean in the School of Theology, and Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is also the Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. Additionally, he is a fellow in Christian Political Thought at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and serves as the Man

For a special minisode, Hadley Arkes and Garrett Snedeker, who attended the 2024 National Conservatism Conference July 8-10, share impressions of both the public panel discussions and how the conference fits within our larger political and cultural moment. Edmund Burke Foundation, Organizer of NatCon 4 Video of NatCon 4 speeches and panels

Esteemed constitutional scholar and gifted law professor Randy Barnett joins the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of his new memoir A Life for Liberty: the Making of an American Originalist (Encounter). Prof. Barnett shares vignettes spanning his entire life from his deeply personal memoir on scholarship and practice, mentorship, his reconciling libertarianism and Natural Law, and his fights against anti-semitism. Randy Barnett is the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center where he directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, Professor Barnett has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School. His publications includes thirteen books and countless scholarly articles,

June 28, 2024 will be remembered as a historic day in U.S. Supreme Court history. The Court reversed its forty year old precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a precedent that was the most important and most cited decision in all of administrative law. The Court’s Chevron precedent established a forty year practice of broad judicial deference to federal agency’s authority to interpret ambiguous statutes according to those agencies’ own criteria. In its decision in a pair of cases concerning the regulation of activity on fishing boats falling under the purview of such a vague statute, Loper-Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, the Court established new grounds according to which courts, agencies, and Congress would act. To discuss this "sea-change" in the law, we’re bringing you an exclusive, immediate mini-sode with one of the lawyers part of the team that prevailed, John Vecchione. Mr. Vecchione is a Senior Litigation Counsel for the non-profit New Civi

Minisode 4 features JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes, who shares scenes from his recent trip to Budapest, Hungary where he keynoted a conference on the rule of law. With host Garrett Snedeker, they discuss how the Hungarian government is offering an alternative to the reigning orthodoxies and policy prescriptions of the European Union. He also details some colorful personalities with whom he enjoyed the conference hosted by the Danube Institute.

Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan devoted book-length treatment to shed light on the little-known stories of detransitioners, those individuals who undergo hormone therapies and often transgender surgeries and then reject the path they went down. In this latest Anchoring Truths Podcast episode, Olohan shares her perspective on writing this book as a journalist under the scrutiny of the ideologically-driven establishment media. She also discusses the emotional and physical complexities of transition, as well as the manipulation that has now become commonplace in anything from social media platforms to doctors' offices. Ultimately, Olohan gives a voice to young people she profiles in her book who have undergone intense transgender treatment. Buy Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult here. Follow Mary Margaret Olohan on Twitter/X here and her reporting at the Daily Signal here. Mary Margaret Olohan, a senior reporter covering culture and politics for The Daily Signal, previo

2020 represented an inflection point for what some refer to as the Marxist "long march through the institutions." However, this inflection point was not spontaneous. Rather, according to our Anchoring Truths Podcast guest Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, it was evidence of what he and his co-author call NextGen Marxism. We discuss how this NextGen Marxism arose, what it means for how the Left operates, what it portends for this coming summer's Democratic National Convention, and any hopeful signs it may be abating. Buy NextGen Marxism here Follow Mike Gonzalez on X.com/Twitter here Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, writes on critical race theory, identity politics, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia and Latin America. He left journalism to join the administration of