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.