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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
“The Glorious Liberty Of The Children Of God”: Toward A Christian Defense Of Human Rights, John Witte Jr.
“The Glorious Liberty Of The Children Of God”: Toward A Christian Defense Of Human Rights, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment—creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political …
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …
A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer
A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer
Faculty Articles
The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …
The Hidden Influence Of Jewish Law On The Common Law Tradition: One Lost Example, Michael J. Broyde
The Hidden Influence Of Jewish Law On The Common Law Tradition: One Lost Example, Michael J. Broyde
Faculty Articles
Professor Berman is undoubtedly correct that the surviving literature shows little such influence of Jewish jurisprudence. Over the course of numerous conversations I had with Professor Berman at Emory, we discussed another possibility, namely that the Jewish tradition indeed had a distinct influence on the common law; however, due to the general lack of enthusiasm for the Jewish legal tradition throughout the medieval Christian world, even when Jewish sources were consulted, they were not cited. I wish to show what I think is one such example --the enigmatic origins of the common law rule that the holder of lost property …
Prophets, Priests, And Kings: John Milton And The Reformation Of Rights And Liberties In England, John Witte Jr.
Prophets, Priests, And Kings: John Milton And The Reformation Of Rights And Liberties In England, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
In this Article, I focus on the development of rights talk in the pre-Enlightenment Protestant tradition. More particularly, I show how early modem Calvinists-those Protestants inspired by the teachings of Genevan reformer John Calvin (1509-1564)-developed a theory of fundamental rights as part and product of a broader constitutional theory of resistance and military revolt against tyranny. With unlimited space, I would document how various Calvinist groups from 1550 to 1700 helped to define and defend each and every one of the rights that would later appear in the American Bill of Rights and how these Calvinists condoned armed revolution to …
How To Govern A City On A Hill: The Early Puritan Contribution To American Constitutionalism, John Witte Jr.
How To Govern A City On A Hill: The Early Puritan Contribution To American Constitutionalism, John Witte Jr.
Faculty Articles
This Article explores briefly the constitutional ideas and institutions of seventeenth-century Puritan New England. It analyzes the constitutional ideas that the Puritans derived from their theological doctrines of covenant, church and state, and sin, and it examines the forms and functions of political and ecclesiastical government they devised in implementation of these ideas.