Jurisprudence Commons^™

Contingency And Contestation In Christianity And Liberalism, Michael P. Moreland

Notre Dame Law Review

What is the relationship of Christianity to liberalism? Answers include: Liberalism is a product of the moral legacy of Christianity, such as the dignity of individual human persons, equality, rights, perhaps even some forms of democratic institutionalism. Or liberalism is a hostile reaction against Christianity by way of an autonomous individualism set against divinely ordained creatureliness and dependence, democracy against authority, egalitarianism against hierarchy. Or liberalism is in a modus vivendi relationship with Christianity and vice versa. Or perhaps there is something true about each of these answers.

Critiques of liberalism in law and politics come in waves. The liberal-communitarian …

Tender And Taint: Money And Complicity In Entanglement Jurisprudence, Amy J. Sepinwall

Notre Dame Law Review

Because liberalism is concerned with individual freedom, it finds that one person is responsible for the conduct of another only under very narrow circumstances. To a large extent, the law reflects this narrow conception of complicity. There is however one glaring exception to the law’s general resistance to complicity claims: where one actor becomes connected to another’s act through a pecuniary contribution, the law’s liberalism falls away. Money forges a cognizable association no matter how tenuous the causal connection and no matter the subsidizer’s attitudes toward the subsidized act. For example, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court recognized …

Liberalism And Orthodoxy: A Search For Mutual Apprehension, Brandon Paradise, Fr. Sergey Trostyanskiy

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article seeks to evaluate and contextualize recently intensifying Christian critiques of liberalism’s intellectual and moral claims. Much of this recent critique has been from Catholic and Protestant quarters. Christianity’s third major branch—Orthodox Christianity—has not played a prominent role in current critiques of liberalism. This Article seeks to help fill this void in the literature. In helping to fill this void, it contributes to understanding how liberalism fits with one of the world’s most ancient Christian traditions.

The Article begins by disambiguating the terms Orthodoxy and liberalism. After identifying each body of thought’s foundational commitments, it notes that Orthodoxy endorses …