Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”

The sects and factions that dominated the socio-political life of the early republic were predominantly of Protestant heritage. Their theological commitments, for better or worse, conditioned the early character and trajectory of the nation. Any who deny this are simply not paying attention to the historical data.

There is much talk of the common good today. How can it possibly be invoked intelligibly apart from a definite, concrete conception of the community to which it should be directed and applied, that is, to the nation?

A Short (Legal) History A recent symposium in the Roger Williams University Law Review centered on a perennial question that […]