Law, Love and Freedom
From the Sacred to the Secular

Moving from monasticism to constitutionalism, and from antinomianism to anarchism, this book reveals law's connection with love and freedom.

Joshua Neoh (Author)

9781108446624, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 August 2021

219 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.34 kg

‘This is bold and vigorous work, which in broad strokes seeks to capture the central elements of European legal culture. It surveys a remarkably broad sweep of literature and in doing so captures well the ambivalence we feel about law.’ Julian Rivers, Cambridge Law Journal

How does one lead a life of law, love, and freedom? This inquiry has very deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, the divergent answers to this inquiry mark the transition from Judeo to Christian. This book returns to those roots to trace the twists and turns that these ideas have taken as they move from the sacred to the secular. It relates our most important mode of social organization, law, to two of our most cherished values, love and freedom. In this book, Joshua Neoh sketches the moral vision that underlies our modern legal order and traces our secular legal ideas (constitutionalism versus anarchism) to their theological origins (monasticism versus antinomianism). Law, Love, and Freedom brings together a diverse cast of characters, including Paul and Luther, Augustine and Aquinas, monks and Gnostics, and constitutionalists and anarchists. This book is valuable to any lawyers, philosophers, theologians and historians, who are interested in law as a humanistic discipline.

Introduction
1. Cosmological beginning, eschatological end
2. Conceptual bipolarities
3. Methodological turn to historical narrative
4. Prior narrative: from monasticism to constitutionalism
5. Counter narrative: from antinomianism to anarchism
6. Value pluralism and the search for coherence
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Christianity [HRC]