Faculty

2024 Fellowship Faculty

            Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the Founder and Director of the James Wilson  Institute, a center for the jurisprudence of natural law in Washington, DC. Professor Arkes was a member of the Amherst College faculty since 1966, marking his 50th anniversary of teaching in 2016. In 1987 he was named Edward Ney Professor of  Jurisprudence. He has written five books with Princeton  University Press, and his articles have appeared in professional journals. Apart from his writing in more scholarly formats, he has become known to a wider audience through his writings in the  Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and National Review. He has been a contributor also to First Things, a journal that took its name from his book of that title. He was the main advocate and architect of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’  Protection Act. Professor Arkes modeled the curriculum for  the James Wilson Legal Fellowship off of his signature course at  Amherst, "Political Obligations." The Fellowship focuses on natural law and its bearing on our jurisprudence. The course deals with these central points: the classic connection between the “logic of morals” and the “logic of law”; the properties of moral truths and the “principles” of judgment; and how we may apply those principles to the cases that arise in our law.  
 

           Gerry Bradley

Gerard “Gerry” Bradley teaches Constitutional Law and Legal Ethics at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where he also directs (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute and co-edits The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum of legal philosophy. He served as president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars for many years and has been a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. Bradley received both his B.A. and his J.D. from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. Before teaching at Notre Dame, he served in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and taught at the University of Illinois College of Law. In 2009, he was a Visiting Professor of Politics at Princeton University.  Bradley has published over one hundred and fifty scholarly articles and reviews, and is the author and editor of twelve books, such as Catholic School Teaching: A Collection of Scholarly Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Unquiet Americans: U.S. Catholics, Moral Truth, and the Preservation of our Civil Liberties (Saint Augustine’s Press, 2019). 

             David Forte
 
David F. Forte is Emeritus Professor of Law at Cleveland State University. He has the rare distinction of twice being award a Fulbright Distinguished Chair first at the University of Trento, and recently at the University of Warsaw.  In 2016 and 2017, Professor Forte was the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University. During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council.   He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation both for Congress and for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism.  He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.   He has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions.  Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund, and Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.  He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Institute.   He is Vice-Chair of the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs.  He has published six books and over 200 law review articles and essays. His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, American Politics, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, and Constitutional History.
 
        Justin Dyer
Justin Dyer is director of the Civitas Institute, professor of government, and Jack G. Taylor Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author, with Kody Cooper, of The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
 Ryan Anderson
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the founder and editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. He is also the inaugural St. John Paul II Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Dallas Constantin College of Liberal Arts. He is the author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment and Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, and he is the co-author of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination.  Anderson's research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, in two Supreme Court cases. He received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Magna cum Claude, and he received his doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation was titled: "Neither Liberal Nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights."