Bench Memos

Kmiec and George Square Off

Some readers of this space may know about an exchange last month between Prof. Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine (an Obama supporter) and Prof. Robert George of Princeton (an Obama critic), brokered by Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News, over the legal ramifications of the president’s executive order on the funding of embryonic stem cell research.  If you missed it, links are collected here at MoralAccountability.com.

That exchange ended with the open possibility of a face-to-face debate between George and Kmiec.  In the meantime, and preparatory to such a debate, Kmiec has posed a dozen questions to George, and George has provided his answers.  This latest exchange (again you can find links at MoralAccountability.com) ranges over subjects such as what science knows about when life begins, and what science, law, religion, and morality have to say to us about our obligations to respect human life.  It all makes you wish that the Supreme Court had thought this carefully about such matters when it was adjudicating Roe v. Wade.

Matthew J. Franck is retired from Princeton University, where he was a lecturer in Politics and associate director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is also a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, a contributing editor of Public Discourse, and professor emeritus of political science at Radford University.
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