The Stahl Project: Recovering the Principles of Christian Jurisprudence

Judicial activism... the application of foreign law...the evaporation of traditional values from the law and from the courtroom... legislation being struck down in the name of supposed rights... the transferral of sovereignty to world courts...

These are all issues which hit us right where we stand. They leave us with a feeling of helplessness. How are we to deal with them?

One thing may reassure us: we are not the first. These issues are not new; in fact, they were already confronted head on more than a hundred years ago by a far-seeing German statesman and legal scholar by the name of Friedrich Julius Stahl. Stahl mapped out a conservative Christian legal philosophy harvesting the fruits of the Western legal tradition. His treatment makes them available to a new generation unschooled in its own inheritance.

Stahl returns us to a broadly common-law-oriented jurisprudence integrating custom and legislation, justice and law, rights and institutions, the received historical law and the needs of the here and now, considerations of utility and God-ordained universal standards. He opens the door to restoring the balance between individual rights and an objective legal order which both conditions and protects those rights. He returns us to a jurisprudence respecting the law of nature and nature's God, one which fleshes out the conservative principles first enunciated by Edmund Burke.

The first installment is the Principles of Law, providing the core principles to be fleshed out in the remainder of the series. The second installment, Private Law, provides a detailed exposition of the doctrine of subjective right, natural and acquired rights, and the institutions of private law: property, contract, marriage and the family, inheritance.

Future volumes include State Law, Philosophical Presuppositions, and The History of Legal Philosophy.