Christopher Wolfe

wpeA.gif (13741 bytes) Christopher Wolfe

is emeritus professor of political science at Marquette University. He currently is Vice-President of the Thomas International project and Co-Director of the Ralph McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies. He graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame in 1971 with a major in government and went on to study political philosophy at Boston College, receiving his Ph.D. in 1978. During his graduate studies he "migrated" from political philosophy to American Political Thought and Constitutional Law. He taught at Assumption College from 1975 to 1978 and came to Marquette in 1978, being promoted to associate professor in 1985, and full professor in 1992, and retiring in 2008. He served as department chair from 1997-2000.

Dr. Wolfe’s main area of research and teaching for two decades was Constitutional Law, and his books include The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law (Basic Books, 1986), Judicial Activism: Bulwark of Freedom or Precarious Security? (Brooks/Cole, 1991) and How to Read the Constitution: Originalism, Constitutional Interpretation, and Judicial Power (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). He also edited That Eminent Tribunal: Judicial Supremacy and the Constitution (Princeton University Press, 2004).

In his more recent research, Dr. Wolfe has shifted back to political theory, with studies of natural law and liberalism. His book Natural Law Liberalism was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. In that book, he criticizes contemporary liberal political theory and argues that the traditions of natural law (as represented by Thomas Aquinas) and of liberalism (with its commitment to equality, political consent, competent limited government, individual rights, and the rule of law)—which have been widely viewed as hostile to each other—are, in fact, mutually reinforcing, if understood properly. He is also the editor (with John Hittinger) of Liberalism at the Crossroads (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994; revised edition, 2003), which collects essays on various contemporary liberal political theorists and their critics.

Dr. Wolfe is the founder and President of the American Public Philosophy Institute (1989), a group of scholars from various disciplines that brings natural law theory to bear on contemporary scholarly and public issues. The APPI has organized numerous conferences and panels at professional meetings, which have resulted in edited books: The Family, Civil Society and the State (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998) Homosexuality and American Public Life (Spence Publishing Co., 1999), Natural Law and Public Reason (Georgetown University Press, 2000), and Same-Sex Matters: The Challenge of Homosexuality (Spence Publishing Co., 2000).

Recently Dr. Wolfe became Vice-President of the Thomas International project - www.thomasinternational.org - and Co-Director of the Ralph McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies. The Ralph McInerny Center aims to promote a strong and accurate rereading of Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy and theology and, at the same time, to make Aquinas’ thought fruitfully converse with contemporary culture, especially in the areas of bioethics, political and legal theory, economics, literature, natural sciences, and sociology.

Dr. Wolfe has also published articles in many professional journals and in First Things, as well as book reviews and various opinion pieces. He has lectured at more than 35 American universities, and in Italy, Spain, France, Poland, Austria, Romania, and Hungary. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1994 and in 1997 was named to the Templeton Honor Rolls for Education in a Free Society. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Federalist Society, and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.