Adam J. MacLeod is Professor of Law at Faulkner University, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and a lecturer in the James Madison Program's graduate seminar on the Moral Foundations of Law at Princeton University. He has been a Thomas Edison Fellow in the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton. He is co-editor of Christie and Martin's Jurisprudence (4th ed. 2020) and Foundations of Law (2017), and author of Property and Practical Reason (2015) and of dozens of articles, essays, and book reviews. His most recent book is The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal (2020). He writes and speaks about the foundations of private law and private ordering. He serves as a legal staff officer in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, and previously served as law clerk for state and federal judges in Massachusetts and Colorado, as special Deputy Attorney General of Alabama, and as a lawyer in Boston. He holds degrees from Gordon College and the University of Notre Dame Law School.
The law must stand above the powerful, and we should worry when the law is suspended or disregarded. But where is the law to be found? Most of the law consists of important fictions which live in the minds of lawyers. But what makes the fiction plausible? And how is the law's benefit to be assessed unless we measure it against fixed, non-conventional, non-fictional standards of justice?
Date posted: 2022-03-11
Hobbes' thin conception of natural law cannot sustain all the activities of a fully flourishing community, but it does appeal to those who live in fear of losing their basic security. Many people are possessed by that fear today, as many were in Hobbes' time. But we have much to lose if the Hobbesian view of law prevails.
Date posted: 2020-09-23
No one can say with precision how many people this virus will infect or kill. Predictions are difficult. But we know some things about ourselves, so we can venture to say what this unusual moment will reveal about us.
Date posted: 2020-03-21
America's relations with China should proceed from the recognition that the Chinese government is lawless. China flouts the rule of law, not occasionally or incidentally but characteristically, because the government understands itself as the source of law and unconstrained by it. The problem of China reminds us of the deeper laws that all nations must respect and that determine whether or not our positive laws are legally just.
Date posted: 2019-11-24
Among the universal, fundamental rights every person enjoys is the right to leave his nation of origin. Yet the right to leave does not entail the right to enter a specific nation.
Date posted: 2019-09-08
Can a state legislature abolish civil marriage? Common-law marriage can never entirely be abolished. The duties of marital relations are generated and vested by the actions of the parties themselves.
Date posted: 2018-11-22
Though our political institutions are designed to be secular and non-sectarian, our laws rest on Christian ideas about what we owe each other as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.
Date posted: 2018-08-02
State officials and judges cannot comply with the Supreme Court's ruling in Masterpiece simply by articulating facially neutral reasons for decisions that punish people for acting on the understanding that marriage is a man-woman union.
Date posted: 2018-07-09
Same-sex parenting advocates are calling on states' rights to define the legal relationship between parent and child. What they seek is the power to write the record of a child's origins and to determine a fundamental aspect of a child's identity.
Date posted: 2018-04-29
Just as governors, abortionists, and sexual-identity activists enjoy legal protection for their property rights, so do religious business owners.
Date posted: 2017-12-10
The double maternity two-step is a forced march. The intended destination seems to be greater personal fulfillment for adults. But if we arrive there, what will be left of the rights of children?
Date posted: 2016-11-27
The Governor and Attorney General of Texas should obey the law, not the Supreme Court's ambiguous abstractions. They should continue to secure the fundamental liberty of vulnerable Texans and make the abortion industry assert its super-claim-rights in court.
Date posted: 2016-07-31
A federal court has said a student's subjective understanding alters the meaning of an unambiguous, federal law. And it alters the meaning of the law for everyone in the Gloucester County school district and, potentially, everyone who resides in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
Date posted: 2016-06-01
Whether or not Locke would approve of it, there is a fundamental marriage right. It is ancient, not recent, and it secures the integrity of the natural family. In fact, nothing is more fundamental to our legal edifice than the ancient liberty of the natural family.
Date posted: 2015-08-03
Do proponents of marriage equality want marriage equality or not? The rhetoric of marriage equality does not match the reality. Only if marriage is the union of a man and a woman does it make any sense to have paternity presumed without consent, incest and polygamy prohibited, and custody bestowed upon biological or presumed parents except for cause.
Date posted: 2015-07-25
We ought to demonstrate compassion for Brittany Maynard, but we must not allow our compassion to obscure the nature of her choice - or the consequences that legal acceptance of a legal right to kill has for those left behind.
Date posted: 2014-11-03
It's a myth that marriage law "bans" same-sex relationships because it treats marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Date posted: 2013-06-08
The advances of modern medicine have produced decidedly mixed blessings. People live longer, but they also take longer to die after their bodies start to deteriorate. In the process they often suffer pain, and impaired abilities to enjoy life. And we die more often in hospitals than did earlier generations. A new book, At Liberty to Die: The Battle for Death with Dignity in America by Howard Ball calls readers to consider the challenges these realities raise. To its detriment, the new book on end-of-life law focuses more on the emotions and biases of the law's defenders than on law's history and content.
Date posted: 2013-02-07
Aiding the deliberate destruction of human life has no place in the doctor's job description.
Date posted: 2012-02-20
People quite naturally recognize that life is better than death, that the deliberate destruction of life is an evil to be avoided, and that the state has a role to play in preventing suicides. It follows logically from these uncontested (and incontestable) observations that state laws prohibiting euthanasia and assisted suicide are just and efficacious.
Date posted: 2011-09-27