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Whitehead's Metaphysics And The Law: A Dialogue, Jay Tidmarsh

Journal Articles

The purposes of this Article are to explore the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and the nature of law, and to develop from that exploration a theory of "process jurisprudence." To some extent, this Article is a process of interpretation and imagination. Whitehead himself devoted little attention to the nature of law. Therefore, rather than attempting to declare definitively the implications of Whitehead's thought for the nature of law, this Article is structured in the form of a dialogue between "Whitehead" and a lawyer whom I have called "Chris." In Part II, as he discusses his system of …

The Christian Jurisprudence Of Robert E. Rodes Jr., Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

When I had the chance to leave law practice and become a fulltime law teacher, I turned, in the time-honored fashion, for advice from my law teachers. The most memorable and persistent of these—the most cheerful, too, and therefore the most hopeful—was Robert E. Rodes, Jr., then a young (36), transplanted New Yorker, Harvard law graduate, and Boston lawyer. He had already come to flourish, in the Aristotelian sense, in the Midwest—in a Catholic university known more for its football players than for its lawyers.

Rodes told me he had come to teaching and to Notre Dame because he wanted …

The Jurisprudence Of John Howard Yoder, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

John Howard Yoder, prophet and theologian, died in his office at Notre Dame on December 30, 1997, the day after his seventieth birthday. Peter Steinfels's obituary in the New York Times of January 7, 1998, described my friend and colleague Yoder as "a Mennonite theologian whose writings on Christianity and politics had a major impact on contemporary Christian thinking about the church and social ethics." Steinfels did not describe Yoder's thought as jurisprudence; neither, for that matter, did Yoder. But there was (and is), throughout Yoder's scholarship, an implicit theology of law, a jurisprudence. A jurisprudence that is particularly noticeable …