Praise for MERE NATURAL LAW
“In a legal environment where the long-standing reference to ‘principles of moral law’ was dropped from the Model Rules of Professional Conduct in the 1960s, Mere Natural Law dares to assert that our legal system is based on certain ‘anchoring moral truths’ that are accessible to reason and that legal actors ignore at our peril.
With wit, wisdom, and vivid examples, Hadley Arkes challenges the pervasive moral relativism of today’s mainstream legal thought.”—Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law emerita at Harvard University and author of A Nation under Lawyers
“Hadley Arkes wants the moral judgments that all of us make routinely in everyday life, and that have been central to many great acts of statesmanship, to resume their place in the judgments of courts in matters great and routine. His Mere Natural Law is perfectly timed—the Supreme Court’s quest for a morally agnostic Constitution may have run its course, and many are seeking a way forward. Like Arkes’s previous apologetics for Natural Law, this one is learned, lucid, and emphatic, and will be vigorously debated by veteran adherents and opponents. But it is also addressed to the merely perplexed—down-to-earth, conversational, even chatty. Those who fear Natural Law is too theoretical for our practical world, do not fear to enter here.”
—Christopher DeMuth, distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute
“Hadley Arkes offers progressives, positivists, and originalists alike this superb practical text on ‘mere Natural Law.’ Without the ‘anchoring principles’ found in everyday reason and our innate sense of right and wrong, legal judgments express only ‘feelings’ or crude exertions of power. Arkes demonstrates through examples, logic, and humor how ‘mere Natural Law’ works as the bedrock of our legal system.”
—Edith Hollan Jones, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
“With his characteristic learning, wit, and insight, Hadley Arkes encourages us all to become naïve again, to trust the moral judgments available through common sense, reflection, and lived experience.
In doing so, he recovers the anchoring truths that are the moral ground of the American political and constitutional order. His is a deeper originalism since it refuses to bury the moral truths that the Founders themselves upheld but could largely afford to take for granted. Arkes brilliantly shows that Natural Law is the furthest thing from a theoretical abstraction. It is, instead, rooted in the logic of morals: ‘that the good is higher, more desirable than the bad.’ Drawing on the wisdom of Aristotle, Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and Abraham Lincoln, Arkes recovers ‘mere Natural Law’ and along the way makes a truly impressive case for the ‘moral turn in jurisprudence.’ ”—Daniel J. Mahoney, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and author of The Statesman as Thinker
“Mere Natural Law will invite stylistic comparison with C. S. Lewis, pursuant to which, it turns out, Hadley Arkes’s well-established literary reputation does not suffer in the least.”
—R. George Wright, Michael McCormick II Professor of Law at Indiana University
“Does anyone write about Natural Law with greater humanity, philosophical acumen, and humor than Hadley Arkes? No one comes to mind. Mere Natural Law deserves to be set alongside C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in its profundity and gimlet-eyed appreciation of the manifold depredations of our relativistic culture, hankering everywhere after false gods. Arkes is a natural teacher, and his deep appreciation of the Natural Law roots of the American Founding make this book an indispensable Baedeker for our amnesiac times.”
—Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion
“Some seem to think of the Natural Law as ‘a brooding omnipresence in the sky.’ Others treat it as an abstract and perhaps antiquated theory about the nature of law that one finds only in dusty old law books—something of merely historical interest. But for Hadley Arkes the Natural Law is not only the glue that holds human life together but also the blood pulsing through its veins.
With the penetrating insight of an Aristotle or a James Wilson, the moral fervor of a Daniel Webster, and the wit of a G. K. Chesteron, Arkes demonstrates that laws, policies, and judicial decisions always embody some understanding of moral principle and so are never morally neutral, even if policymakers and judges today often pretend that they are. Neither we nor elected officials nor judges can avoid making moral judgments in matters of policy and law. When it comes to excavating the grounds of those judgments—whether in matters moral, or law and jurisprudence, or the American Founding—there is no better guide for the expedition than the inimitable Hadley Arkes.”—Paul DeHart, professor of political science at Texas State University
“A learned and deeply felt appeal for the restoration of traditional moral principles to a place in the working jurisprudence of American law. The author’s treatment and condemnation of the practice of abortion provides his most trenchant example of the Natural Law’s place in this effort.”
—R. H. Helmholz, Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
“With the grace, wit, and clarity of C. S. Lewis in his influential book Mere Christianity, Professor Hadley Arkes has laid out the path of moral reasoning that is inherent in any true understanding of law. Though recognized by the founding generation and the first few that followed, that understanding is largely rejected by the legal academy, lawyers, and judges of our day. Cutting through the esoteric theories and self-refuting nihilism that blind so many of those ‘burdened with a legal education,’ Professor Arkes elucidates in the style of Lewis, but with greater rigor and detail, the fundamental axioms and principles of reason from which the moral truths that comprise the Natural Law are drawn. Mere Natural Law is an important book for anyone concerned about the role of the courts in shaping the culture.”
—William C. Griesbach, United States district judge for the Eastern District of Wisconsin
“Natural Law is today subject to contortions from both its supporters and critics that often render it opaque to jurists and legislators, and unrecognizable to citizens.
Its critics contrive ever more sophisticated ways to conceal their positivist nihilism, and many of its supporters concede too much ground to modern philosophical obfuscations, using unnatural language and concepts. Thus the great virtue of Hadley Arkes’s Mere Natural Law is how it cuts through the self-imposed confusions and reacquaints us with the commonsense first principles of Natural Law. Common sense is ironically uncommon today, and to the extent that nature as the ground of law was something that had to be discovered, Mere Natural Law could be said to be a rediscovery. Its lively prose and compelling line of arguments can be compared to a stately clipper ship emerging from a becalming fog with a fresh wind to fill its sails.”—Steven F. Hayward, lecturer at Berkeley Law
“This book will start you down the path to recovering the meaning of everything.”
—Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College