Great post, Carl. Hard to believe 5 yrs have passed without Lawler. Here's a question, maybe for your follow-up post: does a flourishing (pomcon) politics depend on something like Scalia's legal positivism? Or do we want our judges to interpret the Constitution in full, in light of the truth about who we are as relational persons?
One update--I did talk subsequently to Matthew Franck, and he did know of the piece he wrote which I had in mind, which was meant to correct some typical misuses of the term "judicial activism," and not, as I had misremembered it, to reject its use altogether. Its still worth reading 16 years later--and it does support, I think, a conservative approach to the issue that emphasizes the issue of interpretation--originalism v. living constitution--over the issue of restraint/activism.
Great post, Carl. Hard to believe 5 yrs have passed without Lawler. Here's a question, maybe for your follow-up post: does a flourishing (pomcon) politics depend on something like Scalia's legal positivism? Or do we want our judges to interpret the Constitution in full, in light of the truth about who we are as relational persons?
One update--I did talk subsequently to Matthew Franck, and he did know of the piece he wrote which I had in mind, which was meant to correct some typical misuses of the term "judicial activism," and not, as I had misremembered it, to reject its use altogether. Its still worth reading 16 years later--and it does support, I think, a conservative approach to the issue that emphasizes the issue of interpretation--originalism v. living constitution--over the issue of restraint/activism.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/09/depends-what-meaning-judicial-activism-matthew-j-franck/