The Integrative Jurisprudence Of Harold J Berman

The essays in this volume appeared in slightly different versions in the Emory Law Journal, volume 42, number 2, pages 433-560. The edited and revised versions of those essays are published with the consent of the editors of the Emory Law Journal to whom grateful acknowledgment is given.

From the early days of European settlement in North America, Christianity has had a profound impact on American law and culture. This volume profiles nineteen of America's most influential Christian jurists from the early colonial era to the present day. Anyone interested in American legal history and jurisprudence, the role Christianity has played throughout the nation's history, and the relationship between faith and law will enjoy this worthy and unique study. The jurists covered in this collection were pious men and women, but that does not mean they agreed on how faith should inform law. From Roger Williams and John Cotton to Antonin Scalia and Mary Ann Glendon, America's great Christian jurists have brought their faith to bear on the practice of law in different ways and to different effects.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Little has previously been written about the faith of the great judges who framed and developed the English common law over centuries, but this unique volume explores how their beliefs were reflected in their judicial functions. This comparative study, embracing ten centuries of English law, draws some remarkable conclusions as to how Christianity shaped the views of lawyers and judges. Adopting a long historical perspective, this volume also explores the lives of judges whose practice in or conception of law helped to shape the Church, its law or the articulation of its doctrine.

Harold Berman's masterwork narrates the interaction of evolution and revolution in the development of Western law. This new volume explores two successive transformations of the Western legal tradition under the impact of the sixteenth-century German Reformation and the seventeenth-century English Revolution, with particular emphasis on Lutheran and Calvinist influences. Berman examines the far-reaching consequences of these apocalyptic political and social upheavals on the systems of legal philosophy, legal science, criminal law, civil and economic law, and social law in Germany and England and throughout Europe as a whole. Berman challenges both conventional approaches to legal history, which have neglected the religious foundations of Western legal systems, and standard social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the communitarian dimensions of early modern economic law, including corporation law and social welfare. Clearly written and cogently argued, this long-awaited, magisterial work is a major contribution to an understanding of the relationship of law to Western belief systems.

This book argues that despite the tensions existing in all societies between religious faith and legal order, they inevitably interact. In the course of his discussion Berman traces the history of Western law, exposes the fallacies of law theories that fail to take religion into account, examines key theological, prophetic, and educational themes, and looks at the role of religion in the Soviet and post-Soviet state.

Completed in 1964, Harold J. Berman's long-lost tract shows how properly negotiated, translated and formalised legal language is essential to fostering peace and understanding within local and international communities. Exemplifying interdisciplinary and comparative legal scholarship long before they were fashionable, it is a fascinating prequel to Berman's monumental Law and Revolution series. It also anticipates many of the main themes of the modern movements of law, language and ethics. In his Introduction, John Witte, Jr, a student and colleague of Berman, contextualises the text within the development of Berman's legal thought and in the evolution of interdisciplinary legal studies. He has also pieced together some of the missing sections from Berman's other early writings and provided notes and critical apparatus throughout. An Afterword by Tibor Várady, another student and colleague of Berman, illustrates via modern cases the wisdom and utility of Berman's theories of law, language and community.

In this `Dickensian century' of human rights, the world has cultivated the best of religious rights protections, but witnessed the worst of religious rights abuses. In this volume, Jimmy Carter, John T. Noonan, Jr., and a score of leading jurists assess critically and comparatively the religious rights laws and practices of the international community and of selected states in the Atlantic continents. This volume and its companion Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives are products of an ongoing project on religion, human rights and democracy undertaken by the Law and Religion Program at Emory University.