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Students of law, history, ethics, or religion will learn from this fresh and ambitious four-hundred-year narrative of the varied interactions of American common law - the stuff of courtrooms - and natural law, a higher moral law. Arguing against prevailing scholarly views, its chapters re-assess major figures and debates.
List of contents
1. Puritan natural law: early New England and the colonial colleges; 2. Modern natural law: revolutionaries and republicans; 3. Organizing common law: William Blackstone in America; 4. subsuming natural law into common law: Joseph Story; 5. Law as science: Christopher Columbus Langdell; 6. Breaking with natural law: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the legal realists; Epilogue; Index.
About the author
Andrew Forsyth is Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, and Assistant Secretary in the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for Student Life, at Yale University, Connecticut. A Cambridge law graduate, he studied theology and religious studies at the University of Glasgow, Harvard University, and Yale University. He has recently published articles in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Scottish Journal of Theology.
Summary
Students of law, history, ethics, or religion will learn from this fresh and ambitious four-hundred-year narrative of the varied interactions of American common law - the stuff of courtrooms - and natural law, a higher moral law. Arguing against prevailing scholarly views, its chapters re-assess major figures and debates.
