Suppose that while browsing in the bookstore you run across a book called Great Left-handed Jurists in American History. Or maybe Great Bald Jurists in American History. These books will no doubt strike you as odd. What sense do these criteria make as a way of selecting legal figures for study? What does left-handedness, or baldness, have to do with jurisprudence, or with law?
The book I just finished reading has a different principle of selection, and a different title: Great Christian Jurists in American History. Edited by Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, the book consists of a series of succinct, instructive chapters presenting a variety of American political leaders, lawyers, judges, and scholars, ranging from colonial figures like John Winthrop and John Cotton to Founders like John Dickinson and James Wilson to still very active figures like Michael McConnell and Robert P. George. The book’s criterion of selection—its characters’ Christianity—and its title will not look so obviously odd or arbitrary, I suspect, because it seems prima facie plausible to suppose that Christianity might have some significant influence on what people think about or do with law.
That might be true. But is it? And if Christianity has influenced thinking about law in an American context, exactly how has that influence worked?
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