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Event
Children & Chairs: Artifacts & Reality with Prof. Adam MacLeod
Date & Time
Mon, Oct 20, 2025 • 2:00 pm
Organization
James Wilson Institute
Venue
Webinar
Webinar Information

Prof. Adam MacLeod of St. Mary's Law School will join us to discuss the arguments presented in his recent article for the Catholic University Law Review, "Children & Chairs: Articfacts & Reality." Prof. MacLeod will unpack the concept of legal personhood, a legal artifact created to identify and secure the rights of human beings or groups of human beings. He will show how these legal artifacts rely upon the natural understanding of the human person, and how understanding children as persons created naturally rather than by political will clarifies the rights and protections they are owed.

Meet Adam MacLeod

Adam MacLeod is Professor of Law at the St. Mary’s University School of Law. He is a Senior Research Fellow of the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, and he lectures in the James Madison Program’s summer seminar on the Moral Foundations of Law at Princeton University. MacLeod is a James Wilson Affiliated Scholar. MacLeod has been a fellow at Princeton University and George Mason University, lecturer in the Alabama Judicial College, special Deputy Attorney General of Alabama, and an Auxiliary advisor to active duty and auxiliary commands in the U.S. Coast Guard. Before his academic career, he practiced law in Boston and served as law clerk to Chief Justice Christopher Armstrong and Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Appeals Court and then-Chief Judge Lewis T. Babcock of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado.

MacLeod is the author of four books, dozens of book chapters and scholarly articles, and more than one hundred essays and book reviews. His published writings include Property and Practical Reason (Cambridge University Press 2015), peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the Modern Law Review and Journal of Law & Religion, and law review articles in journals such as the Notre Dame Law Review and Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from Gordon College and his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame.