Alexander Pruss's Blog

Combine these two rather Stoic theses: No one can make the fully virtuous person worse off Doing what is morally wrong always makes you w...

Laws need to be promulgated to be valid. Why? A Thomistic story is that valid laws create genuine reasons to act, and reasons are the sort o...

Human law is a blunt instrument. We often replace the thing that we actually care about by a proxy for it, because it makes the law easier t...

One of the central insights of Western philosophy, beginning with Socrates, has been that few if any things are as bad for an individual as ...

Here’s a valid argument: It is only permissible to punish a person for doing what is morally wrong. It is permissible for the state to pu...

In an old post , I observe the curious phenomenon that a typical attempted murder is not an attempt to murder and a typical attempted theft ...

This morning, I was reading the Georgia Supreme Court’s Simpson v. State (1893) decision on a cross-state shooting, and loved this example,...

In the US, you are sometimes told that something “violates federal law”, and it is said in a way that suggests that violating federal law i...

I keep on wondering about how it is that legislators seem to be completely oblivious to obvious counterexamples. Take the definition of a ri...

A standard principle in the interpretation of Catholic canon law is the principle that restrictive laws are understood narrowly and permissi...

In Bostock , the Supreme Court held that a refusal to hire, say, a man who is attracted to men is discrimination on the basis of sex if one ...

In Bostock , the Supreme Court ruled that hiring discrimination against a gay person is discrimination on the basis of sex, and hence forbid...

Aquinas thinks that for something to be a law, it must be “for the common good” (in addition to satisfying other conditions). Otherwise, the...

I do formal epistemology, but I am no legal scholar, so this could be a complete misunderstanding. It is my understanding that in civil case...

This post is an oblique response to one of the lines of thought in a petition against Notre Dame University's lawsuit against the HHS co...

Here is an example of a civic duty that isn't required by law: Be reasonably well informed as to what the law commands in your...

I rarely comment on current politics.  Still, I want to say something here.  A bill has been proposed in the Texas Legislature to ban discri...

Disclaimer: This post does not contain accounting, legal or tax advice, and I am not an accounting, legal or tax professional. Rathe...

Consider the following argument: (Premise) A law that is unjust is defective. (Premise) A law that places a special burden on those...

We are clearly not morally required to obey laws that tell us to do something immoral. But what about laws that, while not requiring anythi...