Abortion, Public Policy, and the Law

Professor Hadley Arkes has been a member of the Amherst college faculty since 1966, was the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence, and was appointed in 1987 as the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions. His many articles appear in both scholarly journals and in the popular press, such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Weekly Standard, and National Review. Professor Arkes has been a contributor to First Things, a journal that took its name from his book of that title. Two of his most recent books include Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (2002), and Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2010). Together with friends, he formed the web journal, The Catholic Thing.

 

He was the main advocate and architect of the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, first proposed by him in 1988 as part of the debating kit for George H.W. Bush, and finally signed into law by George W. Bush on August 5, 2002. At Amherst, Professor Arkes founded the Committee for the American Founding, a group of alumni and students who seek to preserve at Amherst the doctrines of “natural rights” taught by the American Founders and Lincoln. More recently, that interest has carried over to the founding of a new center for the jurisprudence of natural law in Washington, D.C.: the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, named for one of the premier minds among the American Founders.