JWI Presents: Anchoring Truths Podcast

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.

Josh Hammer returns to the Anchoring Truths Podcast for a discussion of his first book Israel The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. The book is a powerful, next-generation manifesto declaring that the future prosperity and ultimate fate of Western civilization is dependent upon the security and thriving of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel—that the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland demands a distinctly realist foreign policy and tight-knit US-Israel relations.In addition to being a contributing editor at Anchoring Truths, Josh is a 2021 James Wilson Fellow. He is the senior editor-at-large of Newsweek, where he hosts "The Josh Hammer Show" podcast and syndicated radio show. A syndicated columnist through Creators Syndicate, Josh also hosts the "America on Trial with Josh Hammer" podcast for The First. Josh graduated from Duke University and from the University of Chicago Law School. Purchase Josh's book hereListen to The Josh Hammer ShowListen to America on Trial with Josh Hammer*Toward the end of the podcast, Josh notes that he meant to cite Rabbi Hillel, rather than Rabbi Akiva, in discussing the Golden Rule and its origins in Leviticus 19.

We’re pleased to have as our guest Daniel Whitehead. Daniel was a 2022 James Wilson Fellow. He served in the General Counsel’s Office of Governor Ron DeSantis and has clerked on two federal courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. He was also a John Marshall Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Hungary Foundation, where he is spending a year living in Budapest. We were eager to hear about Daniel’s experience in Hungary living amidst the Hungarian people, learning the Hungarian language, and conducting original research and writing. We also discuss his recent article we republished at Anchoring Truths titled Securitization: A Solution to the Migration Crisis in the United States.

As part of our ongoing webinar series between the James Wilson Institute and the Center on Religion, Culture, and Democracy, Professor William Kamin discusses the debates over Federal post-conviction Habeas Corpus. Whether one looks towards the Judicial Right or the Judicial Left, there are serious issues plaguing both perspectives on this topic. Professor Kamin offers an in-depth explanation on a new approach to postconviction Habeas Corpus--one that offers a more luminous beacon to guide lawyers and scholars alike.

Blink and you may have missed it. President Trumpsigned into law another executive order, this one touching on a significant concern for pro-life Americans: in-vitro fertilization. The President’s latest EO reinserts us back into a debate over what legal protections should be afforded to embryos and the attendant public policy ramifications. But this debate goes even beyond the President’s EO, to debates about the future of pro-life politics. Joining us to discuss these subjects is our friend Steve Aden.Steve serves as Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel atAmericans United for Life. He is a highly experienced litigator, having appeared in court against Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry dozens of times andappointed by the attorneys general of six states to defend pro-life laws. Aden secured court victories that upheld an Arizona law that resulted in six abortion businesses ceasing to offer abortion, applied Missouri’s abortion laws to chemical abortion and upheld the right of Louisiana regulators to shut down dangerous abortion facilities.A prolific author and analyst on sanctity of life issues andconstitutional jurisprudence, Aden is admitted to the bars of the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Hawaii (inactive), and is a member of the bars of the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous federal circuit and district courts. He earned his J.D. (cum laude) from Georgetown University Law Center and his B.A. from the University of Hawaii.

The opening weeks of the Trump presidency have featured a flurry of Executive Orders aimed not only to reverse the policies and priorities of the Biden Administration but also to advance the Trump administration’s vision of the good. Indeed, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration he placed himself in the middle of the Capital One Arena indowntown DC before a giant rally of his supporters to begin signing these Executive Orders (or EOs). This relatively unprecedented practice of drawing attention to the signing of EOs speaks to how significant they are at altering the political and legal terrain. Some of the most impactful of these EOs concern matters touching on human sexuality and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. We’ll discuss those EOs with attorney Mary Rice Hasson. She is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project, aninitiative that equips parents and faith-based institutions to promote the truth about the human person and counter gender ideology. An attorney and policy expert, Mary has been a keynote speaker for the Holy See during theUnited Nations Commission on the Status of Women, addressing education, women and work, caregiving, and gender ideology, and serves as a consultant to theU.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family, Life and Youth.The co-author of several books on education, Mary’s writinghas appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, National Review, First Things, the National Catholic Register and OurSunday Visitor, among others.A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Notre DameLaw School, Mary is married to Seamus Hasson, and they are parents of seven grown children and grandparents of seven.Much of our discussion springs from this article she co-authored inFirst Things.

Alex MacDonald, a DC-based labor lawyer, touches on the historical roots of the right to work, the right’s connection with natural-law principles, and its return to modern jurisprudence. Informed by JWI Co-Director Hadley Arkes's Mere Natural Law, Alex examines how that return could transform modern labor law, especially the concept of exclusive representation. This episode, adapted from a lecture he delivered to the James Wilson Institute and the Center on Religion Culture & Democracy in 2024, draws largely upon Alex’s article published in the North Dakota Law Review.