The Fourth Annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference on the American Polity

Hosted by

James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Princeton University

Cosponsored by

Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy Georgetown University

Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy Boston College

And with the Participation of

Alexander Hamilton Institute Clinton, NY

Tocqueville Program for Inquiry Into Religion and American Public Life University of Notre Dame

Prospect House Library

The Fourth Annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference on the American Polity features student presentations of noteworthy research relevant to the shared intellectual missions of the sponsoring programs. Papers will address the principles and practice of American political life from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophical and moral, historical, legal and constitutional, and religious and cultural inquiries.

Conference Schedule

All Conference Sessions held in Prospect House Library

8:15 – 8:45 a.m. Continental Breakfast Reception Prospect House Drawing Room

8:45 a.m. Opening Remarks Bradford P. Wilson, James Madison Program

9:00 – 10:45 a.m. and Culture

Chair: Sotirios Barber, University of Notre Dame

Panelists: Christopher M. Fitzpatrick, Boston College James Sasso, Boston College Kees D. Thompson, Princeton University

Respondents: Sarah Houser, Georgetown University Steven Brust, Georgetown University Stefan McDaniel, University of Pennsylvania 11:15 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Ideals and Institutions

Chair: Patrick Deneen, Georgetown University Panelists: Noah Bishop, Hamilton College Katherine Bermingham, Georgetown University Thomas Cheeseman, Hamilton College

Respondents: Sherif Girgis, Princeton University Matthew O’Brien, University of Texas at Austin Patrick Deneen, Georgetown University 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. Lunch Frist Campus Center

2:00 – 3:15 p.m. Campus Tour with Matthew Milliner Nassau Hall

3:15 – 3:45 p.m. Afternoon Reception Prospect House

3:45 – 5:30 p.m.

Chair: Robert Paquette, Alexander Hamilton Institute

Panelists: Justin R. Hawkins, Georgetown University Samuel B. Norton, Princeton University University of Notre Dame

Respondents: Sara Henary, Princeton University Nicholas Troester, Princeton University Robert Paquette, Alexander Hamilton Institute

6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Dinner Prospect House, Room E

7:00 p.m.

Moderator: Ken I. Kersch Director, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College; author of Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law and the forthcoming Forging Constitutional Conservatism: From the Brown Decision to Reagan Featured Guest: Director, William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University in Virginia; author of Against the Imperial Judiciary: The Supreme Court vs. The Sovereignty of the People and co-­editor and co-­author of Sober as a Judge.

Undergraduate Presenters

Katherine BerminghamLiberal Individualism and the Encumbrance of Affectionate Love

Miss Bermingham is a member of Georgetown’s class of 2011, double-­majoring in Government and English. She isparticularly interested in how democratic theory impacts the

Noah BishopRational Belief in the Existence of God

Mr. Bishop is a member of the class of 2011 at Hamilton College and an undergraduate fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute. He is majoring in economics and philosophy. He is from Summit, New Jersey.

Thomas CheesemanThe Natural Rights Dilemma: Organic Order and the Constructivist

Fallacy

Mr. Cheeseman is a member of the class of 2012 at Hamilton College and is an undergraduate fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute. He is majoring in math and economics. He is from Chardon, Ohio.

Christopher M. FitzpatrickClashing Ideals – The Origin and Effects of the Culture War in

American Politics

Mr. Fitzpatrick is a sophomore at Boston College, specializing in International Studies and Political Science. He is a Junior Fellow of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and serves as Undergraduate Assistant to the Center Director.

“Salt that Lost its Savor”: The Decline of the American Puritan

Tradition

Mr. Hawkins is a senior at Georgetown University majoring in Government with an emphasis on Political Theory, and with minors in Theology and Spanish. After graduation in May, he plans to continue his studies by earning a Master’s in Divinity. He is from Breinigsville, Pennsylvania.

Capital Punishment in the US and Abroad

majoring in political science. He is especially interested in constitutional law and interpretation.

Samuel B. Norton

Mr. Norton is a junior at Princeton University and an Undergraduate Fellow of the James Madison Program. He is majoring in politics with a focus on international relations. He is from Falmouth, Maine.

Tensions it Aims to Solve, as Seen by Castro v. Beecher

Mr. Sasso is a junior at Boston College, majoring in History and Political Science with a concentration in American Politics. He plans on writing his thesis on polarization in American politics and how it affected the 2008 Democratic super-­majority.

Kees D. ThompsonThe Balance of Partisanship: The Extension of the Ramseyen Model

to the Judicial Independence of the United States in the Early 19th

Century

Mr. Thompson is a sophomore at Princeton University and an Undergraduate Fellow of the James Madison Program. He isinterested in politics and public policy, and is considering attending Law School after graduation. He was born andraised in San Diego, California.

Chairs and Respondents

is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He combines interests in political philosophy and the American Constitution. He is the author of: The Constitution and the Delegation of Congressional Power (1975); On What the Constitution Means (1984); The Constitution of Judicial Power (1993); and Welfare and the Constitution (2003). With the Madison Program’s founding Director, Robert George, he is the co-­editor of Constitutional Politics: Essays in Constitution Making, Maintenance, and Change (2002). With Walter Murphy, James Fleming, and Stephen Macedo, he is co-­author/editor of American Constitutional Interpretation (third edition, 2003). He has also published numerous articles in constitutional theory. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

is the Associate Director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy at Georgetown University. He holds both a Ph.D. in politics from The Catholic University of America and a M.A. in philosophy from Franciscan University of Steubenville. His teaching and research interests include the history of Western political thought, natural law and natural rights, law and morality, and Church and State relations. He also has a strong interest in Catholic Social Teaching, especially as it relates to the present state of the American political order and American culture. He has contributed a few entries to Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy: An Encyclopedia and a book review and article to The Catholic Social Science Review. He also is contributing a chapter to the book, Toward the Common Good: A Catholic Critique of the Discipline of Political Science. He is currently working on an article on pre-­modern natural rights, and on a manuscript titled “The Political Thought of Francisco Suarez,” which primarily concerns the ideas of the social contract and popular sovereignty, the separation of Church and State, and natural rights, within the context of the emergence of modern liberal democracy.

is the inaugural holder of the Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-­Kounalakis Chair of Hellenic Studies in the Department of Government and the Founding Director of the Tocqueville Forum. He is the author of two books: The Odyssey of Political Theory and Democratic Faithas various as Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Vico, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, John Dewey, G.K. Chesterton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wilson Carey McWilliams. His work has appeared in

academic journals and journals of opinion, including Political Theory, Perspectives on Political Science, Polis, Modern Language Studies, Social Research, Commonweal, Society, First Things, The Weekly Standard, The Hedgehog Review, The Dallas Morning News, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently at work on two book projects: “Another America: The Alternative Tradition in American Political Thought” and “The Idea of Division of Labor in the History of Western Political Thought.”

Sherif Girgis received an A.B. in philosophy at Princeton and B.Phil. at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Princeton, and a 2010-­11 Undergraduate Fellows Coordinator for the James Madison Program.

Sara M. Henary is the 2010 -­11 Olin-­Lehrman Postdoctoral Research Associate at the James Madiso Program. She is a political theorist whose teaching and research interests include modern political theory, American political thought, religion and politics, and politics and literature. Her dissertation, Nature and Convention in Locke’s Political Philosophy, examines the theoretical foundations of Locke’s social and political thought, and argues that Locke ultimately relies on custom and convention rather than “nature” in order to ground social and political life. She has recently written on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. A graduate of Rhodes College, she received her Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia in December 2010.

Sarah Houser received a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the 2010-­11 Tocqueville Forum’s Jack Miller Center-­Veritas Post-­Doctoral Fellow. In the Fall 2010 semester at Georgetown University, Dr. Houser taught a course in the Government Department called “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” which examined the development of these two concepts in the history of political thought. Dr. Houser is teaching a course in the Government a course called “The American Regime” with Professor Patrick Deneen.

Stefan McDaniel received an A.B. in religion at Princeton University and is a Ph.D. student in political theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously was a fellow at First Things magazine.

received an A.B. in philosophy at Princeton

of Pennsylvania, and M.A. in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is scheduled to defend his dissertation later this spring. He is a 2010-­11 Undergraduate Fellows Coordinator for the James Madison Program.

is co-­founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. From 1994 until 2011, he held the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professorship in American History at Hamilton College. He has published dozens of books and articles on the history of slavery. His Sugar Is Made with Blood won the Elsa Goveia Prize, given every three years by the Association of Caribbean Historians for the best book in Caribbean history. More recently, his essay “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair” (co-­author with Douglas Egerton) won the Malcolm C. Clark Award, given by the South Carolina Historical Society. He has co-­edited (with Stanley Engerman) The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion; (with Louis A. Ferleger) Slavery, Secession, and Southern History; (with Stanley Engerman and Seymour Drescher) Slavery; (with Mark M. Smith) The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2010); and, with Rebecca J. Fox, “Unbought Grace”: An Elizabeth Fox-­Genovese Reader.” He is currently working on A Grand Carnage, a study of the largest slave insurrection in United States history and, with Douglas Egerton, Court of Death: A Documentary History of the Denmark Vesey Affair. In 2005, the University of Rochester invited him to return to his alma mater to receive the Mary Young Award for Council of the Jack Miller Center. In 2008 he was appointed to the advisory board of the Cobb Forum on Southern Jurisprudence and Intellectual Thought of the Watson-­Brown Foundation. That same year, President George W. Bush forwarded his nomination to the Senate for a seat on the National Council on the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. with honors in 1982 from the University of Rochester.

Nicholas Troester is a 2010-­11 Postdoctoral Research Associate at the James Madison Program. He is a political theorist interested in modern political theory, human rights, and the law of war. His dissertation, Rethinking International Law: Hugo Grotius, Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention, used the work of Grotius to demonstrate how far international law has drifted from its intellectual foundations. In future work, he would like to continue looking at the development of international law as a response to the political and religious instability of the early modern period, and continue examining the theoretical assumptions behind contemporary international law and international relations; he is also developing a project on political poetry. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Duke University.

Notes

Prospect House

Frist Campus Center

Nassau Hall