Hadley Arkes
Hadley P. Arkes (born 1940) is an American political scientist and the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions "emeritus" at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1966. He is currently the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding in Washington, D.C. Education. Arkes received a B.A. degree at the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago where he was a student of Leo Strauss. Career. In a series of books and articles dating from the mid-1980s, Arkes has written on "a priori" moral  principles and advocated for their impact on constitutional interpretation. He has also dealt with their relation to constitutional jurisprudence and natural law, and their challenge to moral relativism. His works draw on political philosophers from Aristotle through the U.S. Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and contemporary authors and jurists. John O. McGinnis, reviewing Arkes' "Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths" in "The Wall Street Journal", writes that it tries to find a path between the extremes of originalism, where the meaning of the U. S.Constitution is fixed by its original text, and the idea of the living constitution, where its meaning is updated by  evolving moral principles. Arkes is founder and a member of the Committee for the American Founding, a group of Amherst alumni and students seeking to preserve the doctrines of "natural rights" exposited by some American Founders and Lincoln through the Colloquium on the American Founding at Amherst and in Washington, D.C. Arkes serves on the advisory board and writes for "First Things", an ecumenical journal that focuses on encouraging a "religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." Arkes also serves on the advisory boards of "Americans United for Life", the "Catholic League", and St. Augustine's Press. Arkes  serves on the board of trustees of the "National Center on Sexual Exploitation". In September 2016, Arkes was among 125 Conservatives for Trump who announced they supported Donald Trump's candidacy to be president. Personal life. In 2010, Arkes, born and raised a Jew, converted to Catholicism, which he described as a fulfillment of his Jewish faith.