Justin Buckley Dyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 697548 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Justin Buckley Dyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Justin Buckley |
| FAMILY NAME | Dyer |
| SIGNATURE | DYER J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Missouri |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Harry Jaffa and the Idea That All Men Are Created Equal
Reason, Revelation, and the Law of Nature in James Wilson’s Lectures on Law
One unresolved question in the scholarship on James Wilson concerns the relationship between his natural law jurisprudence and Christianity. Engaging that debate, this article marshals evidence for the continuity of Wilson’s lectures with the Christian natural law tradition. Indeed, Wilson’s lectures offer a vision of founding-era jurisprudence that is self-consciously rooted in a divinely created and rationally intelligible moral order that is b…
The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights
Political Science and American Political Thought
Written as a short personal reflection, this article explores the development of political science as an organized professional discipline in the United States. At its inception, political science in the United States was principally concerned with political thought and constitutionalism, and it was taught with the public-spirited purpose of educating for citizenship in a constitutional democracy. Twentieth-century methodological trends at one ti…
Thomas Jefferson, Nature's God, and the Theological Foundations of Natural-Rights Republicanism
While the role of theology in Jefferson's political thought and its implications for how we should understand the role of “Nature's God” in grounding natural-rights republicanism are topics of ongoing scholarly interest, scholars have missed important continuities between Jefferson's natural-law theory and that of classical, theistic natural-law. Many scholars who have considered Jefferson in this light have emphasized Jefferson's discontinuity a…
Constitutional Confusion: Slavery, Abortion, and Substantive Constitutional Analysis
A comparison of two U.S. Supreme Court cases about fundamental rights, one on slavery, the other on abortion, sheds light on constitutional law and the principles undergirding liberal constitutional democracy. The Dred Scott case in 1857 denied constitutional rights to enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the United States. The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 created a constitutional right to abortion that denied constitutional personho…
C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law
Rawlsian Public Reason and the Theological Framework of Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham City Jail
The ideal of public reason, made prominent by John Rawls, has become a mainstay of discussions about the proper role of religious arguments in a politically liberal society. In particular, Rawls's theory of public reason requires citizens and public officials to refrain from appealing to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines in public deliberation on matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials. In this essay, we review th…
Slavery and the Magna Carta in the Development of Anglo-American Constitutionalism
If English and American constitutional thought rests on one shared foundation, it is the principle that executive power, in order to be legitimate, must be subject to law. In the thirteenth century, the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that “the law makes the King”—rather than the King makes the law—and urged, “Let the King ... bestow upon the law what the law bestows upon him, namely dominion and power, for there is no King where will ru…
RevisitingDred Scott: Prudence, Providence, and the Limits of Constitutional Statesmanship
After the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Abraham Lincoln embarked on a public campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery in the federal territories. Lincoln's opposition to Dred Scott was, however, bound up with a certain theoretical orientation that is often rejected in the general milieu of modern constitutional theory. Within the context of two recent revisionist accounts of slavery and American constitutionalism, I argue that our retrospectiv…
After the Revolution: Somerset and the Antislavery Tradition in Anglo-American Constitutional Development
Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared in Somerset v. Stewart (1772) that the nature of slavery is "so odious ... nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law." In this essay, I trace the principle laid down in Somerset through several cases that occurred during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and I pay particular attention to two conservative judicial opinions in the 1820's: Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in The Ante…
Lincolnian Natural Right, Dred Scott, and the Jurisprudence of John McLean
John McLean's opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) has been considered by most scholars as the weaker of the case's two dissenting opinions. McLean's presidential ambitions were well known, and, as a consequence, much of the moral language employed in his opinion has been interpreted as obiter dictum directed at placating the abolitionist sentiment of the emerging Republican Party. In this essay, I argue that much of the contemporary criticis…
Reason, Revelation, and the Law of Nature in James Wilson’s Lectures on Law
One unresolved question in the scholarship on James Wilson concerns the relationship between his natural law jurisprudence and Christianity. Engaging that debate, this article marshals evidence for the continuity of Wilson’s lectures with the Christian natural law tradition. Indeed, Wilson’s lectures offer a vision of founding-era jurisprudence that is self-consciously rooted in a divinely created and rationally intelligible moral order that is b…
After the Revolution: Somerset and the Antislavery Tradition in Anglo-American Constitutional Development
Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared in Somerset v. Stewart (1772) that the nature of slavery is "so odious ... nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law." In this essay, I trace the principle laid down in Somerset through several cases that occurred during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and I pay particular attention to two conservative judicial opinions in the 1820's: Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in The Ante…
After the Revolution: Somerset and the Antislavery Tradition in Anglo-American Constitutional Development
Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared in Somerset v. Stewart (1772) that the nature of slavery is "so odious ... nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law." In this essay, I trace the principle laid down in Somerset through several cases that occurred during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and I pay particular attention to two conservative judicial opinions in the 1820's: Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in The Ante…
Lincolnian Natural Right, Dred Scott, and the Jurisprudence of John McLean
John McLean's opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) has been considered by most scholars as the weaker of the case's two dissenting opinions. McLean's presidential ambitions were well known, and, as a consequence, much of the moral language employed in his opinion has been interpreted as obiter dictum directed at placating the abolitionist sentiment of the emerging Republican Party. In this essay, I argue that much of the contemporary criticis…
Slavery and the Magna Carta in the Development of Anglo-American Constitutionalism
If English and American constitutional thought rests on one shared foundation, it is the principle that executive power, in order to be legitimate, must be subject to law. In the thirteenth century, the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that “the law makes the King”—rather than the King makes the law—and urged, “Let the King ... bestow upon the law what the law bestows upon him, namely dominion and power, for there is no King where will ru…
RevisitingDred Scott: Prudence, Providence, and the Limits of Constitutional Statesmanship
After the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Abraham Lincoln embarked on a public campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery in the federal territories. Lincoln's opposition to Dred Scott was, however, bound up with a certain theoretical orientation that is often rejected in the general milieu of modern constitutional theory. Within the context of two recent revisionist accounts of slavery and American constitutionalism, I argue that our retrospectiv…
Rawlsian Public Reason and the Theological Framework of Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham City Jail
The ideal of public reason, made prominent by John Rawls, has become a mainstay of discussions about the proper role of religious arguments in a politically liberal society. In particular, Rawls's theory of public reason requires citizens and public officials to refrain from appealing to comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines in public deliberation on matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials. In this essay, we review th…
C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law
Political Science and American Political Thought
Written as a short personal reflection, this article explores the development of political science as an organized professional discipline in the United States. At its inception, political science in the United States was principally concerned with political thought and constitutionalism, and it was taught with the public-spirited purpose of educating for citizenship in a constitutional democracy. Twentieth-century methodological trends at one ti…
Thomas Jefferson, Nature's God, and the Theological Foundations of Natural-Rights Republicanism
While the role of theology in Jefferson's political thought and its implications for how we should understand the role of “Nature's God” in grounding natural-rights republicanism are topics of ongoing scholarly interest, scholars have missed important continuities between Jefferson's natural-law theory and that of classical, theistic natural-law. Many scholars who have considered Jefferson in this light have emphasized Jefferson's discontinuity a…
Constitutional Confusion: Slavery, Abortion, and Substantive Constitutional Analysis
A comparison of two U.S. Supreme Court cases about fundamental rights, one on slavery, the other on abortion, sheds light on constitutional law and the principles undergirding liberal constitutional democracy. The Dred Scott case in 1857 denied constitutional rights to enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the United States. The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 created a constitutional right to abortion that denied constitutional personho…
The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights
Reason, Revelation, and the Law of Nature in James Wilson’s Lectures on Law
One unresolved question in the scholarship on James Wilson concerns the relationship between his natural law jurisprudence and Christianity. Engaging that debate, this article marshals evidence for the continuity of Wilson’s lectures with the Christian natural law tradition. Indeed, Wilson’s lectures offer a vision of founding-era jurisprudence that is self-consciously rooted in a divinely created and rationally intelligible moral order that is b…
Harry Jaffa and the Idea That All Men Are Created Equal
Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)