The Moral Framework of Parental Rights

Join us for the third episode of the Natural Law Moment! In an episode recorded before the Supreme Court decided U.S. v. Skrmetti, Professors Arkes and Bradley take up the issue of parental rights in our jurisprudence. Does deference to parental rights truly encompass a right to opt-out of regime that would regulate surgeries and therapies related to gender dysphoria for minors? The framework for understanding the stakes of the case was notably silent on the moral questions at the heart of parental rights as well. They discuss the cases and state statutes leading up to Skrmetti, among them: Buck v. Bell, Skinner v. Oklahoma, Brown v. Board of Education. They also discuss how the Supreme Court will consider the contours of parental rights again next term in Chiles v. Salazar. The question Arkes and Bradley consider behind all these cases is that of the legitimacy of moral normativity in legal jurisprudence. Tune in!Hadley Arkes has been a member of the Amherst College faculty since 1966, and since 1987 he has been the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence. He has written five books with Princeton University Press: Bureaucracy, The Marshall Plan and the National Interest (1972), The Philosopher in the City (1981), First Things (1986), Beyond the Constitution (1990), and The Return of George Sutherland (1994). His more recent books have been with Cambridge University Press, including Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (2002), and Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2010). His newest book is Mere Natural Law (2023) from Regnery. His articles have appeared in professional journals. Apart from his writing in more scholarly formats, he has become known to a wider audience through his writings in the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and National Review. He has been a contributor also to First Things, a journal that took its name from his book of that title.He was the main advocate, and architect, of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act. Prof. Arkes first prepared his proposal as part of the debating kit assembled for the first George Bush in 1988. On August 5, President Bush signed the bill into law with Professor Arkes in attendance.Professor Arkes has been the founder, at Amherst, of the Committee for the American Founding, a group of alumni and students seeking to preserve, at Amherst, the doctrines of “natural rights” taught by the American Founders and Lincoln. That interest has been carried over now to the founding of a new center for the jurisprudence of natural law, in Washington DC: the James Wilson Institute, named for one of the premier legal minds among the American Founders.Gerard V. Bradley is Co-Director of the James Wilson Institute. He served as professor of law at the University of Notre Dame from 1992 to 2024, where he taught Legal Ethics and Constitutional Law. At Notre Dame he directed (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute and co-edited The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum for legal philosophy. He served as president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars for many years and has been a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.Bradley received his B.A and J.D. degrees from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. Before teaching at Notre Dame, he served in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and taught at the University of Chicago College of Law. In 2009, he was a Visiting Professor of Politics at Princeton University.Bradley has published over one hundred and fifty scholarly articles and reviews, and is the author and editor of twelve books, such as Catholic School Teaching: A Collection of Scholarly Essays (2019) and Unquiet Americans: U.S. Catholics, Moral Truth, and the Preservation of our Civil Liberties (2019).