“We cannot endow people with intelligence. Intelligence fundamentally is this capacity to ask questions, and this capacity is entirely from nature.”

My concern here is the rule of law, in all its operations. I select the unexpected word “operations” in order to telegraph a difference from much other natural law jurisprudence. The rule of law is not just a battery of operations; however, failure to appreciate the place of operations in the rule of law leads to a straw-man rule of law—and we know too well the fate of straw men. It is flesh-and-blood men and women whose operations bring about the rule of law, if a rule of law there is to be.

The nineteenth century was the age of legal science. Across the globe, numerous cultures began to think of their law in terms of an interlocking system of internally coherent rules. While the details differ, these movements shared the belief that numerous legal propositions were held together by a small number of core legal concepts, and that correct decisions could be determined via formal methods of legal deduction and analysis. This mode of legal thought gave increased importance to legal concepts and analytic categories. Duncan Kennedy has termed this mode of legal analysis Classical Legal Thought.

This restructuring of legal analysis brought about changes in the understanding of what the law is and how it should be studied. In its American variant, the ascendance of Classical Legal Thought is usually associated with Christopher C. Langdell's tenure as dean of Harvard's law school. Langdell created the modern law school by shifting legal training away from apprenticeship and moving it to a university setting where students were trained as legal scholars. Underlying the Langdellian moment is the assumption that law is comprised of analytic concepts which can be apolitically applied through a series of deductions made from the core legal principal.

As a Jesuit priest whose ministry includes the teaching of constitutional law, I regularly struggle with the task of interpreting two foundational normative texts: the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. The Bible plays a central normative role in the life of the Church, while the Constitution provides a normative framework for American law and politics. These texts ground the ongoing lives of both the Church and the American political community. Both of these textually constituted communities face the challenge of appropriating for contemporary experience a normative text produced in a significantly different historical context. But can American constitutional lawyers learn anything from the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted within the life of the Church?

Jaroslav Pelikan, eminent historian of the Church's doctrinal tradition and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, believes that those engaged in the enterprise of constitutional interpretation can indeed learn something from the history of biblical interpretation. Drawing on a life-long “study of the twenty centuries of interpreting Christian Scriptures,” Pelikan offers his new book, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution, in the hope that it “may be of some help and illumination … to those who stand in the tradition of the two centuries of interpreting American Scripture.” (37)

A remarkable phenomenon in the history of Western political and legal thought is the emergence of so-called sixteenth-century Calvinist resistance theory. Groups of intellectuals, committed to the theology of John Calvin and seeing the Reformed churches of their homelands oppressed by hostile monarchs, stepped beyond the rather strict obedience that Calvin commended toward civil authority and advocated various degrees of civil disobedience and even revolution. Two early and famous expressions of Calvinist resistance theory were from the “Marian exiles,” British Calvinists on the continent who fled the persecution of Bloody Mary Tudor in the 1550s, and the French Huguenots who wrote in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572. Scholars have made impressive claims about these writers. Many perceive in their work a major turning point in political and legal theory and identify it as a key source for the development of Western revolutionary thinking and modernization more generally.