Academic

Patrick McKinley Brennan (Villanova University School of Law) has posted Lawmaking, Administration, and Traces of Civic Republicanism: Thought?s on Jean Porter?s Ministers of the Law (Journal of Catholic Social Thought: Symposium on Jean Porter's Ministers of the Law: Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This paper highlights some of the most salient and perhaps controversial implications of a natural law basis of human lawmaking. First, it requires the rejection of a libertarian presumption in favor of less government and lawmaking. Second, it grounds legal authority in political authority, which in turn is the body politic's responsibility and right to determine the contingent ways by which its members will do what the natural law allows or requires. Third, it entails that promulgated legislative intent, not text, is the locus of law. Textualism is ruled out because it is (in a technical sense) mindless: it mistakenly maintains that law can exist other than in minds. Fourth, such recognition requires ample opportunity and adequate mechanisms for law to be made by those who are in position to discern the concrete requirements of the good in particular circumstances. Administration is therefore central to law, not peripheral to or inconsistent with law. This paper was written as a response to Jean Porter's new book Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority.