Law Commons^™

The New Moralizers: Transforming The Conservative Legal Agenda, David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

The essential elements of a wide range of social policies can be described in terms of responses to three basic questions. First, what burdens must the innocent carry? Second, what burdens must the blameworthy bear? And third, how does society assess blame? This Essay examines the increasingly successful efforts of a faction of social conservatives, called here the new moralizers, to reshape the resolution of each of these three issues and with them a wide range of social policies. Although the relative importance of these three questions has varied over time, the twentieth century saw a movement away from costly …