He is currently the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding in Washington, D.C. Arkes grew up in Chicago.

[3] In a series of books and articles dating from the mid-1980s, Arkes has written on a priori moral principles and advocated for their impact on constitutional interpretation.

Republican virtue, Arkes wrote, presented the solution to the interconnected problems of racial integration, free speech, and urban crime.

Michael Uhlmann wrote in a review of that book, “Arkes would be the first to acknowledge that his take on particular cases and controversies can be reasonably disputed, but he brings to the table of constitutional discourse a long missing and badly needed element—the recognition that the text of the Constitution rests on a particular kind of moral reasoning that conservatives ignore at their peril, and at the peril of the very rights they seek to protect.

Steven J. Eagle reviewed Arkes’s successful defense of Sutherland in the Wall Street Journal, writing, “Advocating that the Supreme Court again espouse natural-rights jurisprudence is an ambitious undertaking, as is attempting to rehabilitate the Supreme Court justice who, for many, personifies the ideas behind substantive due process.

[12] In 2021, Arkes co-authored the influential manifesto "A Better Originalism" with lawyer and writer Josh Hammer, Matthew Peterson, and Garrett Snedeker.

[13] Arkes serves on the advisory board and writes for First Things, an ecumenical journal that focuses on encouraging a "religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society."

Fourteen years later, on August 5, 2002, his son, President George W. Bush signed the bill into law, with Arkes by his side.