Law at a Crossroads: Natural Family as Justice? Or Disintegration as Organizing Precept?
An entry in Justinian’s Institutes famously observes that “knowledge of law amounts to little if it overlooks the persons for whose sake law is made.” Recently, a jurist educated at our country’s preeminent university and law school, and just confirmed to a seat upon vacancy on the highest court in the land, impeccably depicted the American ruling class when announcing under oath and before the watching nation her inability to define what a woman is. The legal-cultural condition represented by this episode (among proliferating others) is a calamity we have not sufficiently appreciated—either as to the meaning of the condition itself or the alteration of law and society it heralds.
The contemporary depublicking of the human body and family abolishes God and his purposive wisdom, revealed in creation, from civic acknowledgment. As the community is denied the cues and guidance of created meaning, thuggery and stigma emerge as expedients to regiment the polity. Extrinsic pressure supplants intrinsic truth in a way that parallels technocratic science, in which engineered possibility supplants givenness and telos.
Yet human nature remains, as do the normative claims of the natural family. And many states’ family law standards continue to possess vital elements of historic and truthful content. But these legal holdouts are now in jeopardy, calling for their intelligent reassertion and justification.
May 25, 2022
7:45 am - 6:00 pm
Invited papers will be presented, followed by discussion among participants.
