The CCCG hosted the 2026 True Lectures the week of March 18 featuring speaker Jud Campbell, professor at Stanford Law School and Helen L. Crocker Faculty Scholar, and drawing a diverse crowd of students, staff, and faculty from across disciplines.
The True Lectures are an endowed lecture series made possible by the generosity of Tad and Jennifer True. They aim to showcase new and cutting-edge scholarship on American constitutionalism and engage the Notre Dame community in conversation about American legal and philosophical principles. In opening remarks on Wednesday, CCCG Director Vincent Phillip Muñoz stated that in inaugurating the True Lectures two years ago, he “actually had Jud Campbell in mind,” and was “just thrilled” about hosting him at Notre Dame.
Campbell’s Wednesday lecture in Eck Visitors Center was entitled “Natural Rights at the Founding," and built on James Madison’s hesitancy relating to the Bill of Rights and the often-forgotten text of the 9th Amendment. Throughout his lecture, Campbell discussed whether the rights of Americans are limited merely to the text of the Constitution based on the Founders’ view of natural rights. This lecture was followed by a reception for all attendees and a private dinner for Campbell and Notre Dame graduate students to participate in further conversation.
Campbell offered a second lecture on Thursday on “Federalism and the Decline of Natural Rights,” during which he traced constitutional interpretation throughout “intellectual shifts” of the 19th and 20th centuries that “radically upended the ideas that rules of morality were natural and existed across society” and instead understood law as “socially constructed.” Like Wednesday’s evening activities, this lecture was followed by a reception and a dinner where law, philosophy, and political science faculty members continued conversation with Campbell and his Friday lecture interlocutors.
Campbell closed the 2026 True Lectures on Friday afternoon in a discussion on “The Legacy of Natural Rights,” joined by Professors Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School and Tom West of Hillsdale College. Campbell reiterated the central arguments of his previous lectures, explaining that though “parts of the Constitution's text identify certain general fundamental rights by name,” it is also true that “enumeration did not legally freeze those rights or necessarily spell out their content. Back when rights came before government, it was second nature to think fundamental rights could be grounded in natural and customary law. And when those laws were underdeterminate, the people themselves retained the power of ‘determining’ those rights.”
Campbell continued that the “written constitution,” however, “helped inculcate a more positivist attitude toward fundamental law,” and that for “much of our constitutional history,” both a “social contractarian paradigm and an enumerationist paradigm” existed. Campbell put forward that understanding the Founders’ thoughts “about the nature of rights and different modes of enumeration” helps “better uncover the content of their original law or more accurately appraise the original meaning of the text that they produced.”
Campbell’s remarks were followed by those of both Tom West and Philip Hamburger. West explained his own view that “the privilege, the idea of natural rights and natural law and the Founding … has to be understood in light of the big picture – how government secures our rights, and then secondly consent, but consent subordinated to security of natural rights.” West also spoke of citizenship as being “grounded in natural law fundamentally … only making use of tradition and customs from the past in a subordinate role.”
Hamburger argued against Campbell, noting that though he “is surely correct that natural rights were central to the Founders,” his claim that “natural rights were not as enforceable” by the judiciary is an “extraordinary” one that “completely revises early American history” and the “generality and legitimacy of judicial review.” Hamburger said that he was “not sure [he could] find any such statement” from “the Founding generation” that “declarations of natural rights, more than other rights, were traditionally unenforceable.” He concluded that “evidence does not really support … Campbell’s views that declared natural rights were somehow exceptions from judicial enforcement.”
These lectures bolstered a rigorous discussion on natural rights in American law, and were well-attended by Notre Dame undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and community members, drawing 260 attendees over the three-day event. The lectures were also part of the programming of the undergraduate course “1776: The Ideas that Made the Modern World,” launched in January of this year. Campbell’s lectures mark an integral part of the course for students to connect the Founding principles they are learning into the classroom with Campbell’s scholarship on natural rights.
Ella Yates '27, a Tocqueville Fellow majoring in Philosophy and Political Science and minoring in Theology and the Glynn Family Honors Program, is one of the many undergraduates enrolled in the 1776 course. She attended all three lectures, and “appreciated Campbell’s assessment of the Founders’ belief in the necessity and impact of the natural rights tradition and the teleological view of history,” noting that it is “[o]nly with these ideas in mind” that we can “begin to unpack the fullness of the Founding documents and address the growing gap in our justice system caused by the decline of these beliefs in modern society.”
Charlie Stalzer, a current graduate student in the Constitutional Studies program, commented on the success of the lecture series, noting that “[f]or graduate students studying constitutional law and political philosophy, the True Lectures offer a unique opportunity to engage with leading scholars. These lectures are a fantastic complement to Notre Dame’s courses and show aspiring academics what scholarly excellence looks like.”
All True Lectures were recorded via livestream and can be found on the CCCG’s YouTube channel here.
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