The Enforcement of Natural Law by the State: A Response to Professor Calhoun

Response to Misreading the Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Law: A Response to Professor Smolin, which appeared in Volume 15, Number 3 of University of Dayton Law Review

Surrogacy as the Sale of Children: Applying Lessons Learned from Adoption to the Regulation of the Surrogacy Industry\u27s Global Marketing of Children

This Article argues that most surrogacy arrangements, as currently practiced, constitute the “sale of children” under international law and hence should not be legally legitimated. Therefore, maintaining the core legal norm against the sale of children requires rejecting claims that there is a right to procreate through surrogacy. Since a fundamental purpose of law in the modern era of human rights is to protect the inherent dignity of the human person, a claimed legal right that is built upon the sale of human beings must be rejected. This Article refutes common arguments claiming that commercial surrogacy does not constitute the sale of children and should be legally legitimated. Upon analysis, those arguments, and the corollary legal regimens legitimizing a commercial surrogacy industry, are thinly veiled rationalizations for accepting commercial arrangements involving the de jure and de facto transfer of infants in exchange for monetary compensation. This Article describes the minimum regulatory approach under which the practice of surrogacy would not constitute the sale of children. This Article argues that legal principles applicable to adoption, which are designed to protect vulnerable birth parents and children and to prevent human trafficking and the sale of children, should be adapted and applied to surrogacy

America\u27s Creed: The Inevitable, Sometimes Dangerous, Mixing of Religion and Politics

Political and philosophical theorists have often advocated for the exclusion of some or all religious perspectives from full participation in politics. Such approaches create criteria—such as public accessibility, public reason, or secular rationale—to legitimate such exclusion. During the 1990s I argued, as an evangelical Christian, against such exclusionary theories, defending the rights to full and equal political participation by evangelical Christians, traditionalist Roman Catholics, and any others who would be restricted by such criteria