JWI Presents: Anchoring Truths Podcast

As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, Jesse Wegman’s new biography The Lost Founder has brought fresh attention to James Wilson, the Institute's namesake. Wilson, the Scottish-born signer of the Declaration and Constitution, author of the first full draft that began with “We the People,” and one of the first Supreme Court justices, certainly deserved a fresh biography. But Wegman, a former New York Times editorial board member and Brennan Center senior fellow, presents Wilson a bit differently than JWI does. Wegman's Wilson is a democratic champion of popular sovereignty whom the contemporary left can claim. Yet Wilson’s own writings, above all his Lectures on Law, rest on a deeper foundation of natural law that resists easy modern categorization.

Today we discuss the recent Anchoring Truths symposium on the book. With us are two authors of pieces in that symposium. Roberta Bayer is Professor of Political Philosophy at Patrick Henry College; she holds a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame and has written widely on the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Founding. Her essay asks what Wegman misses by underplaying Wilson’s insistence that “We the People” stands under God. Candace Terman is an adjunct professor of law and government at Regent University; she earned her PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin. She contends that Wilson is best understood as America’s Lord Coke, treating the common law as an inductive science of experience that aligns positive law with natural law.

Read Bayer's entry in the symposium

Read Terman's entry in the symposium

Received wisdom of the present moment in constitutional and statutory interpretation begins with the text and moves to the logic, structure, or context of that text, before then focusing on historical practice. What is the role of tradition in American constitutional law?  Why do we so often keep coming back to it even when we have an elite legal culture that is now more focused than ever on ascertaining an objective meaning of text itself? That is the question at the center of Professor Marc DeGirolami’s new book, The Constitution of Practice: On Law and Tradition. It is a short book with a large claim: constitutional traditions are not ornaments on the text. They are the ways a people give concrete form to political excellence and pass it on. They tell us how we have actually governed, worshiped, punished, protected, and persuaded and in so doing they bind citizens to one another. DeGirolami joins us on the Anchoring Truths Podcast to discuss his book's themes.

Marc DeGirolami is the St. John Henry Newman Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law and the Human Person at The Catholic University of America. He previously taught at St. John’s University and was a Visiting Fellow in Princeton’s James Madison Program. A former federal clerk and Assistant District Attorney, he is the author of The Tragedy of Religious Freedom and a leading scholar of constitutional theory, religious liberty, and tradition in American law.

Purchase The Constitution of Practice: On Law and Tradition

Whenever we at the James Wilson Institute begin one of our weeklong fellowships or even our weekend introductory seminars on Natural Law Jurisprudence, we begin not with the writings of our institute’s namesake or even other familiar figures from the Founding. Instead we begin, as Prof. Hadley Arkes’s classic book First Things begins, with the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics on that moral association we call the polis and how articulating understanding of rights and obligations, those markers of political life unique to human beings, springs from the very nature of human beings as the only creatures that can reason about such things. Natural law or right reason, before it became a necessary tool for lawyers, was simply this to Aristotle: a way of understanding how human beings are made to flourish, and politics either serves that end or it fails. Scholar and expert on Aristotle's writings, Alex Petkas, joins us on this week's Anchoring Truths Podcast episode for something of a deep dive into a good bit of the philosophy animating much of our work at the Institute.

Petkas holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton. He taughtancient philosophy, rhetoric, and Greco-Roman history at Princeton, UC San Diego, and on the tenure track at Cal State Fresno. He also hosts The Cost of Glory Podcast, on which he retells Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—the biographies of statesmen, generals, orators, and founders that have trained ambitious men for two thousand years.

As we are about to celebrate Constitution Day in 2026, our latest guest on the Anchoring Truths Podcast says we no longer live under the Constitution as the people who wrote and ratified it understood it. That guest is Ilan Wurman, the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota.The topic we will be discussing his Wurman’s new book, The Constitution of 1789: A New Introduction. Wurman argues that modern doctrine has drifted far from original meaning. Courts, he says, no longer play the limited judicial role the Founders designed. Congress’s commerce and spending powers now underwrite a vast regulatory and welfare state that would have stunned the ratifiers—much of the New Deal order included. Lawmakers have also handed enormous authority to agencies, helping create what he calls a deep state that governs daily life. And war and foreign-affairs powers that originally favored Congress now sit mostly with the President. We unpack those arguments and more. Besides his latest work, Wurman is the author of The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (2020) and A Debt against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (2017), as well as a leading casebook on administrative law. He is also the co-host of a new podcast, Rationally Based. He splits his time between Saint Paul, Minnesota, and rural Arizona.

Follow Wurman on X.com here.

Purchase The Constitution of 1789 here.

Our latest Anchoring Truths Podcast returns to a topic discussed at the beginning of the summer which has only added resonance since: the true meaning of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Our guest is a true giant of the American legal academy—Richard A. Epstein. Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU, Director of the Classical Liberal Institute, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Chicago, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and now Senior Fellow at the Civitas Institute, Epstein has spent more than five decades reshaping how we think about property, contracts, torts, Roman Law, and constitutional structure. His landmark 1985 book Takings remains one of the most influential works of legal scholarship of the modern era. He is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant, rigorous, and fearless classical-liberal thinkers of his generation—a living legend whose writings have shaped generations of lawyers, judges, and scholars.

He’s with us to discuss his powerful new book, The Myth of Birthright Citizenship: What the Fourteenth Amendment Really Says, and to unpack the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Barbara.

Read The Myth of Birthright Citizenship

Follow Epstein's latest writing at Civitas Outlook

Join the Anchoring Truths Podcast as we host author Tim Goeglein for a discussion of his newly co-authored book What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family. Goeglein shares his thoughts on American public life, particularly the engagement in politics, culture, and religion amongst Gen Z. The book is a collection of his sharpest columns that zero in on the six pillars we must rebuild if America is going to flourish again: marriage, the family, authentic manhood, a well-ordered society, vibrant faith, and a true understanding of our history. We were delighted to welcome Goeglein, an astute observer of American cultural and religious trends going back several decades, to the show.

Tim Goeglein served eight years in the White House as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison. Since 2009 he’s been Vice President of External and Government Relations at Focus on the Family.

Purchase What Really Matters

Read JWI Co-Director Gerard Bradley's review of the book.

Learn more about Tim

Imagine being three years old in the heart of the Congo. Your father has just died of cancer. Your mother is left alone to raise five children in a world of poverty, tribal conflict, and political chaos. By every human measure, your future should have been written in hardship and limitation. But that is not the story God wrote for Athanase Kadita Tshibaka—known to friends andcolleagues simply as A.T. In his powerful new memoir, Son of the Congo: A Journey of Tragedy, Triumph, and Transformation, A.T. takes us across six continents and nearly eight decades of an extraordinary life. From near-expulsion as a troubled student to graduating with top honors fromDartmouth and the Tuck School of Business, from surviving coups, wrongful imprisonment, and boardroom battles, to rising as a senior leader at Citigroup overseeing risk across 77 emerging markets, then serving as interim CEO ofOpportunity International. A.T.'s story is not just a rags-to-riches tale, it is also a living testimony of unwavering faith, resilience, and the quiet, miraculous hand of God that turns ashes into beauty. A.T. joins us now to share how a sonof the Congo became a global banking executive, a devoted husband, father, and grandfather as well as friend of ours at the James Wilson Institute—and why he believes every broken beginning can still lead to a divine destination.

Learn more and purchase here Son of the Congo

As part of our ongoing series of episodes devoted to thecelebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration, we are delighted to bring you an episode devoted to the legal relevance of the Declaration’s most famous sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We’ll focus in today’s episode particularly on that last phrase.

In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone described the pursuit of happiness as a science of jurisprudence by which his students could identify, and then apply, the first principles of the Common Law in their future work in law.  Separately, the American founders includedthe pursuit of happiness as one of only three unalienable rights specifically listed in the Declaration of Independence.  Where do Blackstone and the founders agree and disagree in their understanding of the pursuit of happiness? What practical role (if any) did they suggest the concept could serve in English and early American law and legal philosophy?

To discuss these subjects, we are pleased to have Carli N. Conklin with us. She is an associate professor at University of Missouri School of Law, an associate professor of constitutional democracy and former associate director at theKinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and director of the School of Law’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution. She earned her JD/MA and PhD in American Legal History from the University of Virginia, where she received the School of Law’s John and Madeleine Traynor prize for outstanding written work.

This episode is captured from a jointly-sponsored webinar by the James Wilson Institute and the Center for Religion Culture and Democracy of First Liberty Institute.

For the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are pleased to share an intimate discussion with Dr. Matthew Spalding whose timely new book The Making of the American Mind explores the philosophic underpinnings of and story behind the Declaration. Please enjoy this special Anchoring Truths episode as a celebration of our nation’s Independence and Founding.

Spalding, dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel graduate school in Washington D.C. and new board member of the James Wilson Institute, shares the microphone with Professor Hadley Arkes, JWI’s Founder and Co-Director.

Purchase The Making of the American Mind

Learn more about Dr. Spalding

Our latest Anchoring Truths Podcast episode focuses on a new book Taking American Citizenship Seriously: The Recovery of the Fourteenth Amendment. Our guest is the author that book, David R. Upham. With the book, Professor Upham delivers a comprehensive account of the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. Drawing on a close textual analysis, Upham shows how the framers shaped the Amendment to secure the rights to life, liberty, and property for all through due process and equal protection, while reaffirming birthright citizenship for nearly everyone born on U.S. soil. He also recovers the Amendment’s promise to protect core citizenship rights—including the freedoms to travel, engage in commerce, speak freely, bear arms, and live free from racial discrimination or civic exclusion. By recovering this originalmeaning, the book challenges later interpretations and offers fresh insights for today’s constitutional debates.

Professor David R. Upham is an Associate Professor of Law at St. Thomas University College of Law. He earned his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Dallas, along with degrees from Middlebury College and Boston College.