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Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought
edited by Michael W. McConnell, Robert F. Cochran, Jr., and Angela C. Carmella
Yale Univ. Press, 2001
518 pp.; $26.95, paper
How to bring faith and learning together? The bookshelves in my office overflow with the output of hundreds of Christian scholars who have reflected on this question, whether in the broadest terms or with respect to specific disciplines, and from the perspective of virtually every theological tradition, in a wide variety of historical and social contexts.
Surprisingly, however, given the pervasive influence of the law, American legal theory is one area of learning about which Christian scholars have been relatively silent. To be sure, law and religion has attracted attention. John Witte, Jr., directs an innovative Law and Religion program at Emory University, established in 1982. Several journals cover this terrain, which is also being explored by a growing number of scholars. The work of legal historian Harold Berman, for example—particularly The Interaction of Law and Religion (1974) and Faith and Order (1993)—is widely recognized for its depth of insight. Milner Ball—in books such as Lying Down Together: Law, Metaphor, and Theology (1985), The Word and the Law (1993), and Called by Stories: Biblical Sagas and Their Challenge for Law—has given the subject sustained reflection grounded in a deep knowledge of legal practice. In a very different vein, there is a body of literature focusing on what it means to be a Christian and a lawyer; Thomas Baker and Timothy Wood, eds., Can a Good Christian Be a Good Lawyer? (1998) and Joseph Allegretti's The Lawyer's Calling (1996) come to mind.
Still, except for a few specialized areas such as church-state law, American legal thought has largely escaped the Christian faith-and-learning enterprise. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but the upshot has been that there are comparatively few resources to which one can turn to find Christian perspectives on the law and legal theory—until now. In Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, law professors Michael McConnell, Robert Cochran, Jr., and Angela Carmella have compiled an impressive collection of essays—29 in all, plus a foreword by Berman—wherein prominent legal scholars address many aspects of the law in terms of their Christian faith. The result is a substantial contribution to both legal thought and to the literature of faith and learning.
Jesus, the editors note, once asked a lawyer, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" (Luke 10:26). In an intellectual climate that encourages perspectivalism, such questions are timely indeed. Now is an opportune moment for Christian legal scholars to undertake a thorough probing of the many intersections of Christian faith and legal thought. What is remarkable about Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought is the collective sophistication of the essays performing this pathbreaking work. The contributors, coming as they do from a variety of theological traditions and schools of legal thought, have benefited from reading broadly in the literature of Christ and culture and of faith and learning, and the result is a book that consistently stimulates and delights.
There is, of course, as the editors acknowledge, no "single 'Christian' perspective" on the law, a truism that is amply fleshed out in the essays that follow. Part 1 provides Christian perspectives on various schools of legal thought: liberalism, legal realism, critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminism, and law and economics. I was particularly impressed with Michael McConnell's essay on liberalism and people of faith, Stephen Carter's essay on liberal hegemony and religious resistance, and Stephen Bainbridge's essay on law and economics. McConnell concludes that, while "secular liberals frequently disdain religious ways of thinking and use the powers of the state, especially in the field of education, to advance their ideology," the problem goes both ways:
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