Douglas Kmiec says his greatest intellectual influence is 1960s Jesuit author John Courtney Murray, “who employed natural law as a basis for understanding human rights across time and culture.” Recently, he’s been reading everything from Charles Grodin’s “I Like It Better When You’re Funny” to “Why I Am a Catholic,” by Gary Wills, and Robert George and John Dilulio’s “The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis.”
An avid public speaker, last month he took on People for the American Way’s Elliot Mincberg at a Federalist Society luncheon in a debate over the Senate’s handling of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. He criticized the Senate Judiciary Committee’s decision not to send Charles Pickering Sr.’s nomination to a vote in the full Senate. “All idea of constitutional responsibility has been lost,” he said.
