JWI Presents: Anchoring Truths Podcast

Join us for this episode as Professor Robert Luther anticipates judicial nomination selection in Trump's second term. Professor Luther asks two types of questions: formally, "How will the Senate composition impact Judicial Nominations?" "How many seats will be open to fill? Will blue slips still apply for district courts?" "Will any circuit seats be moved to different states?" and substantively, "What types of judges will President Trump nominate and how will this differ from his last term?"Robert Luther, III was appointed Associate Professor of Law in 2025 at Antonin Scalia Law. He teaches and writes on the federal courts, legal and judicial ethics, political law, Congress, and professional sports. He has served at high levels in all three branches of the federal government and recently founded Constitutional Solutions PLLC—a law firm that navigates judicial candidates, judges, elected officials, professional athletes, and executives through high-stakes hearings, investigations, and reputational attacks.Immediately before joining the Scalia Law faculty, Professor Luther spent over five years in the Washington, D.C. office of Jones Day, where his practice focused on strategic counseling, crisis management, and litigation. Prior to joining Jones Day, he served as Associate Counsel to the President of the United States in the White House Counsel’s Office. In the White House, he co-managed the judicial selection process and supervised the preparation of over 150 federal judicial nominees for their successful U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. The New York Times Magazine referred to his work on judicial selection during this period as “unique in White House history.” Before joining the White House, Professor Luther served as Counsel to then–U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where he served as a core member of the team that prepared the Senator for confirmation as United States Attorney General. Professor Luther was also a law clerk to Judge Daniel A. Manion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Earlier in his career, Professor Luther practiced civil and appellate litigation at a boutique firm in Williamsburg, Va. and taught at William & Mary Law School.Professor Luther frequently speaks on the legal profession, political law, and federal judicial selection. His public work has been covered by or appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Fox News, The Hill, The Washington Examiner, National Law Journal, Law360, The Washington Reporter, and elsewhere, while his scholarship is published in the law journals of nearly twenty universities including Harvard, Georgetown, Texas, William & Mary, UC-Davis, UC Law San Francisco, Howard University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Richmond, and Marquette University. He holds active law licenses in Virginia, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court, and half of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Professor Luther serves on the Advisory Board of the Wilson Center for Leadership at Hampden-Sydney College. Since 2019, over 150 of his former students have secured clerkships with federal judges.

As a loose tie in to the launch of our sister podcast, Natural Law Moment, we could not think of a better guest to have on the Anchoring Truths Podcast than Dennis Wieboldt, the author of a new article forthcoming in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy titled "Our Natural Law Moment(s).” The article argues that in the last 100 years, American law has experienced two other Natural Law Moments before today. We explore what today’s moment, the third Natural Law Moment in Mr. Wieboldt’s view, has in common with these past ones, where it has differed, and what it has built on.Dennis Wieboldt is a J.D./Ph.D. student in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a Richard and Peggy Notebaert Premier Fellow at the Graduate School and Edward J. Murphy Fellow at the Law School. The first Notre Dame student to concurrently pursue a J.D./Ph.D. in history, Dennis has authored more than a dozen scholarly articles and book chapters on religious liberty, civil rights, constitutional interpretation, and related subjects.Dennis earned his B.A. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Boston College. After earning his B.A., Dennis earned an M.A. in history from Boston College.Read "Our Natural Law Moment(s)" hereFollow Dennis on Twitter/X here

Join us for this special episode featuring Judge Janice Rogers Brown (U.S. Circuit Court for D.C, ret.). Her remarks, given in 2023 as she received the James Wilson Leadership & the Law Award, comment on the need for judicial courage and fortitude, especially for those who take the Natural Law seriously.

What are the pre-political grounds of property rights? What are the just uses of property according to natural rights and the natural law? In this Anchoring Truths Podcast episode, Prof. Eric Claeys, presents his research on these questions inspired by his new book Natural Property Rights. Claeys, discusses the ways a natural right to property is justified and limited, drawing on sources from ancient, medieval and contemporary analytic philosophy. Claeys also describes the history of how a natural right understanding of property has influenced American positive law and jurisprudence. Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. In his scholarship, Professor Claeys studies theories of natural law and natural rights and their implications in property law. Professor Claeys is a member of the American Law Institute, he serves on the ALI’s Members’ Consultative Group for the first Restatement of Copyright, and he also serves as an adviser to the Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property.Professor Claeys received his AB from Princeton University and his JD from the University of Southern California Law School. After law school, Professor Claeys clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States. He has also taught at Saint Louis University, the University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard Law School, and he is a member of the Princeton Politics Department’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.  

In the pantheon of intellectual giants of modernconservatism, standing first among equals is the late professor Harry Jaffa. Jaffa, who influenced generations of students from his academic perch at Claremont Graduate University, might have been the 20th century’s greatest scholar on the thought of Abraham Lincoln. Jaffa, who along with JWI Founder & Co-Director Hadley Arkes was a student of the great Leo Strauss, produced two seminal books on Lincoln. First, in 1958, he gave us Crisis of the House Divided, a close analysis of the Lincoln Douglas debates, andthen forty two years later, A New Birth of Freedom, which was devoted to the larger project of the causes of the Civil War, the Election of 1860, and the secession thereafter. A former student of Jaffa, and close confidant, Edward Erler, has now come forth with a new book Prophetic Statesmanshipfrom Encounter Books that Jaffa himself entrusted Erler to write as a follow-on to A New Birth of Freedom after Jaffa died about a decade ago. We are deeply pleased then to be joined by Prof. Erler for a wide ranging discussion of this important new work on Lincoln, with a relevance to theissues at the heart of our present way of life that is quite striking. Erler is Professor of Political Science emeritus fromCalifornia State University, San Bernardino, where he taught Political Philosophy and Constitutional Law, and served as Department Chairman from 1984-1991. He is the Author of numerous books and law reviews and professionaljournals, among the most recent, are “From Subjects to Citizens: the Social Contract Origins of American Citizenship”; “Marbury v. Madison and the Progressive Transformation of Judicial Power”;. He received a B.A. in Political Science from San Jose State University, on a grant from the G.I. Bill for services rendered, a M.A. and Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School. He has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and served as Director of theBicentennial for the National Endowment for the Humanities.Purchase Prophetic StatesmanRead more of Prof. Erlier at The American Mind

Could it possibly be the best of times as well as the worst of times for the pro-life movement? This has been a topic we have visited before on this show. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case, immediate celebration met the harsh realities of how divided the country remains on abortion. The political reaction to the Dobbs decision, with Blue States in particular enshrining abortion rights in their states, confirmed that overturning the Roe and Caseyregime would not by itself change the culture. But there have been hopeful signs for pro-lifers intermixed with these challenges in the past few years too. To discuss these ever-changing developments, we can’t think of someone wewould rather have on our show at a more timely moment than Jennie Bradley Lichter.  Jennie assumed the office of President of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund in February, 2025. In this capacity, she proudly directs the organization responsible for the largest  annual gathering of pro-lifers, the March forLife in Washington, D.C.Jennie has wide-ranging legal and policy experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the highest levels of the federal government. During the Trump Administration, Jennie served in the White House as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) where she supervised rulemaking and policy efforts implicating a number of federal agencies, and led policy initiatives across the federal government to defend the dignity of life.Prior to her White House service, Jennie was Deputy General Counsel at Catholic University of America, and worked on policy issues and federal judicial (including Supreme Court) confirmation efforts in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S.Department of Justice.  She previously served as in-house counsel for the Archdiocese of Washington. Early in her legal career, Jennie clerked for two federal appeals court judges and was an associate at the international law firm Jones Day.Jennie graduated from the University of Notre Dame and from Harvard Law School, and earned an M.Phil in Theology & Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge in the UK.  Jennie Bradley Lichter's full biography at the March for Life

Can one federal district court judge, even temporarily, be more powerful than the President of the United States? That’s the issue at the heart of the critical debate over the legal remedy known as the nationwide injunction. The deployment of this legal remedy by federal district court judges has increased significantly in the past ten years, most acutely though during the presidencies of Donald Trump to enjoin, or stop, his administration’s policies from being carried into full effect. The Supreme Court is poised to take up the scope as well as underlying justification for nationwide injunctions in the Trump v. Casa Inc. case, which is scheduled for oral argument on May 15. To help us understand nationwide injunctions and the stakes of the upcoming oral argument, we could think of no one better than our friend GianCarlo Canaparo. GianCarlo is the co-author of One Ring to Rule Them All: Individual Judgments, Nationwide Injunctions, and Universal Handcuffs published in the Notre Dame Law Review. GianCarlo is a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Canaparo’s research focuses primarily on constitutional and administrative law. He earned his law degree from Georgetown University, where he was a published editor of the Georgetown Law Journal, and his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Davis.Read More: The Best Way to Fix Nationwide InjunctionsOne Ring to Rule Them All: Individual Judgments, Nationwide Injunctions, and Universal Handcuffs

For a special episode of the Anchoring Truths Podcast, we bring you a presentation featuring Prof. Julia Mahoney of the University of Virginia School of Law. Prof. Mahoney examines how the Classical Legal Tradition has been making a return in American law. She discusses some recent opinions that provide a hopeful opportunity for its return to legal practice and describes the rising interest in this perspective within legal academia. Julia D. Mahoney teaches courses in property, government finance, constitutional law and nonprofit organizations. A graduate of Yale Law School, she joined the University of Virginia faculty as an associate professor in 1999 and is now John S. Battle Professor of Law. She has also taught at the University of Southern California Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, and before entering the legal academy, practiced law at the New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Her scholarly articles include works on land preservation, eminent domain, health care reform and property rights in human biological materials.

Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast for an episode featuring a scholar quite near and dear to us at the James Wilson Institute, Daniel Mahoney.Mahoney is an affiliated scholar with the James Wilson Institute, and with his latest book he applies his gift of prose to perhaps our most pertinent cultural issue, the rise and possible fall of wokism with The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now from Encounter Books.   Mahoney is a professor emeritus at Assumption University (where he taught from 1986 until 2021), a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a senior writer at Law and Liberty. He has written extensively on statesmanship, French politicalthought, the art and political thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, conservatism, religion and politics, and various themes in political philosophy. His most recent books are The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order (2011), TheOther Solzhenitsyn (2014, reissued in 2020), and The Idol ofOur Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. Purchase The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now from Encounter Books.

Join Anchoring Truths Podcast hosts Garrett Snedeker & Daniel Osborne for a discussion of bringing Congress back to the center of our legal and political life. The backdrop for their discussion was their visit to the University of Michigan Law School in March for the annual Federalist Society Student Symposium. This year, the Symposium was titled "Congress: Reviving the Impetuous Vortex." Snedeker and Osborne offer observations about their visit to Ann Arbor as well as examine recent legal flashpoints through the lens of what the congressional role could or ought to be. They also discuss how the conference is a fantastic occasion for meeting students interested in the broader work of the James Wilson Institute.Videos of the panels Snedeker and Osborne discuss may be found on the Federalist Society's website.