Biblical Law and the First Year Curriculum of American Legal Education

Abstract

From the landing of the seventeenth century Pilgrims, who wanted to establish in the colony of Massachusetts Bay a commonwealth that was distinctive precisely because of its fidelity to biblical commands, down to the present moment in American politics, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson continues to organize a “rainbow coalition” by the use of biblical rhetoric and when the Rev. Pat Robertson is considering a run for the Presidency to reassert the need for “biblical values” in America, the Bible has been inextricably interwoven into the fabric of American life, including the formation of American public policy. In 1982, the centennial year of the Society for Biblical Literature, this reality was explored thoughtfully in series of essays that filled six volumes. More recently, Pastor Richard John Neuhaus has differentiated between the constitutional separation of the institutions of the state and the church and an extraconstitutional separation of religiously based morality from the realm of public policy choices.

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