The James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding

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  • Looking Back at our 2024 Winter Fellowship

    Posted by James Wilson Institute on Jan 26, 2024
    In praise of our 2024 Winter James Wilson Fellows …
  • Finishing My Law School Marathon

    Posted by Garrett Snedeker on Jan 8, 2024
    On December 14, 2023 I visited the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, surrounded by a small group of colleagues, friends, and family, for the culmination of a more than four year journey from law school through the bar exam. Judge Greg Katsas was kind enough to offer to swear me in to the D.C. […] …
  • JWI 2.0 Major Announcements

    Posted by James Wilson Institute on Oct 16, 2023
    We are thrilled to announce the biggest news in our decade-long history! These three updates are the building blocks in the next era of JWI, what we like to call JWI 2.0.    JWI receives the largest grant in the organization’s history:  $1.4 million Earlier this summer, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation (DDSF), one of the […] …
  • Professor Hadley Arkes: “The Wages of Dobbs: And the Confusions of Conservative Jurisprudence”

    Posted by James Wilson Institute on Oct 11, 2023
    In his article, The Wages of Dobbs: And the Confusions of Conservative Jurisprudence, written for the Summer 2023 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Professor Hadley Arkes reflects on Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization and how the overturning of Roe is true to form for the last four decades of conservative jurisprudence. The conservative […] …
  • 2023 UT and UVA Natural Law Jurisprudence Seminars

    Posted by James Wilson Institute on Sep 27, 2023
    In these last couple of weeks of September, we were ecstatic to host our Natural Law Jurisprudence Seminars at the University of Texas Law School and the University of Virginia Law School. Though it is customary for us to host only one seminar per semester, the enthusiasm for this program was so great that we […] …
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Anchoring Truths - a James Wilson Institute project
The James Wilson Institute has sought to recover, and to teach again, those anchoring truths that provided for the Founders the moral ground of the law.
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The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.
— James Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1790