A) INTRODUCTION.

B) MORALITY IN THE LAWS.

C) SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE.

D) TRADITION ENDS.

E) OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

 

 

A) INTRODUCTION

 

 

This is mostly taken from an article in, “Impact #303,” by Douglas W. Phillips, Esq.

 

It is impossible to pass a law, which is free from moral implications (I said, “implications,” not “moral” alone).  The real question is not whether man can legislate morality, but which system of morality will be legislated.  All laws are either explicitly moral, or procedural to a moral concept in a society that wants to get along.  Thus, the American law system.

 

 

B) MORALITY IN THE LAWS

 

 

True Law presupposes that:

a) Order is good and chaos is bad.

b) Property rights should be honored.

c) Life should be preserved.

 

Therefore, the question is:  By what standard should man legislate?  There are only two standards by which man can govern.  1) The Law of God, or 2) the will of man.  There is NO middle ground.

 

America’s founding Fathers understood that there is no middle ground.  They declared their allegiance to the Creator and acknowledged that He had established Law and order with transcendent Moral Principles.  In other words, American lawmakers began with:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”  By so stating, the “Declaration of Independence” drew from, and incorporated into the charter of our nation, a (hoped and prayed for) one-thousand-year Western legal tradition firmly rooted in the Law of God.

 

For decades, American law students learned their foundation for law from Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England was their primary text.  The Commentaries were not merely an approach to the study of law -- “they were the law.”

 

 

C) SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE

 

 

Blackstone predicated his entire analysis of law on the superiority of special revelation (the Bible) over general revelation (nature), on the reality of a literal twenty-four hour, six-day creation week; also upon a literal Adam, and a literal Fall, resulting in the corruption of human reason, which lead to a “Dominion Mandate” of the Law of God as the foundation for the, “Law of Property Ownership.”  See my Bible Study:  “COMMUNISM OR PRIVATE PROPERTY.”

 

Blackstone affirmed the authority of Scripture as the only legitimate foundation for society, and he specifically refuted the idea that laws could evolve as societies change.  He wrote:  “Men do not make laws, they do but discover them.  Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority.  They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. . . The doctrines thus delivered we call revealed or Divine Law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. . . And if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and prefect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task would be easy. . . But every man now finds the contrary in his experience, that his reason is corrupt.”

 

Despite the enormous influence of Blackstone’s distinctively creationist approach to law, his writings have been relegated to obscurity in most of today’s law schools in America.  In the July 1978 edition of the “American Bar Association Journal,” noted historian, Henry Steele Commager, summarized what happened:  “[They] substituted the operations of the law of evolution for the Laws of God.”

 

 

D) TRADITION ENDS

 

 

A millennium of Christian legal tradition came to an end in 1870 A.D.  In that year, Christopher Columbus Langdell, newly appointed Dean of Harvard Law School, began a revolutionary approach to legal education, which specifically discarded the Genesis foundation of law in favor of a philosophy rooted in Darwinism.  Langdell abandoned the historic method of teaching Christian principles of the common law in favor of the new, “Case-Book Method,” which directed the student to discover law through the constantly evolving opinion of judges [i.e., situational ethics].

 

Langdell described the relationship between science, law, and uniformitarianism in the preface to the first “Case-Book” ever published, in his work, “Cases on Contracts:”  “Law, considered as a science. . . has arrived at its present state by slow degrees; in other words, it is a growth, extending in many cases through centuries. This growth is to be traced in the main through a series of cases; and much the shortest and best, if not the only way of mastering the doctrine effectively is by studying the cases in which it is embodied.”  Thus, Langdell can be credited for what began as a now century-long tradition, whereby judges no longer viewed themselves bound to interpret pre-existing laws.  They may now decide what laws should be; as opposed to what they are.

 

Therefore, Langdell pointed to the autonomous reason of man and his legal revolution proved to be the single greatest influence on American law since the publication of “Blackstone’s Commentaries” in 1765 A.D.  In the years that followed, with the introduction of the “Case-Book” method, scholars and jurists would continue to integrate evolutionism into the American legal system.  While Langdell’s primary influence had been to create a distinctively Darwinian methodology of legal education, the job of reshaping the conclusions of law in the image of evolutionary humanism would be left to his student progeny and intellectual successors.

 

 

E) OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

 

 

The single most influential jurist of the Twentieth Century, was the United States Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.   His massive treatise, “The Common Law,” supplanted “Blackstone’s Commentaries” as the premier text for law students.  Holmes taught:  “. . . the life of the law has not been logic, but experience,” and argued that it was the responsibility of courts to direct the evolution of law.

 

Because right and wrong do not exist in any absolute sense, judges must determine which standards are most appropriate at a given point in the evolution of a society.  For three decades, Holmes brought his distinctively Darwinian bias to the Court.  He spoke candidly:  “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.”

 

A consistent evolutionist, Holmes declared that, “the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction.”  He authored the landmark decision in, “Buck vs. Bell,” upholding a Virginia eugenics law mandating the involuntary sterilization of people the State deemed undesirable.  Quoting Holmes, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”  Standing before a judge can be frightening; let alone one these believing judges.

 

Holmes and his contemporaries laid the foundation for legalized abortion; no-fault divorce; the legalization of homosexuality; the rejection of the Framers vision for Constitutional interpretation; and the true breakdown of American law.  Today, most courts have embraced an evolving standard for Constitutional interpretation, rejecting the notion that the Constitution must be interpreted in light to the meanings intended by the Framers. 

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