David McIlroy

For almost two millennia, the island of Ireland has continued to have an impact on European and English-speaking Christianity and culture out of all proportion to its size and position. This volume looks at key Irish figures, beyond lawyers and judges, whose ideas have impacted on the way law is conceived, conceptualised, and practised. The work consists of four Parts, each corresponding to a distinct historical phase. During the Early Mediaeval Period, Christian influence was visible both in Ireland’s brehon legal system and in the treatises which Irish monks wrote on subjects such as the law of war and how to rule as a Christian prince. In the post-mediaeval period, the Protestant Ascendancy required defenders of the new settlement, whose ideas would have ramifications for the colonisation of the New World. We also find Ireland producing thinkers of international stature such as Archbishop James Ussher, Bishop George Berkeley, and Edmund Burke, who set a trend of Irish influence throughout the English-speaking world. The struggle for independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced the towering figures of Daniel O’Connell, Edward Carson, and Eamon de Valera, as well as Patrick Pearse, the lodestar of the Easter Rising in 1916. In the twentieth century, great Irish men and women who influenced English-speaking culture include C.S. Lewis, James Joyce, Richard O’Sullivan KC, and Herbert McCabe. They show the enduring importance of a commitment to reason and a desire for virtue against the backdrop of the conflicts, both domestic and international, which impacted Ireland. With contributions drawn from Irish, British, and North American scholars and lawyers, the diversity of international and methodological perspectives is a key strength of the volume. The book will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the history of ideas, the interplay between religion and law, and Ireland as a place of contestation, experimentation, and generation of new ideas.

Robert Alexy defines law as including a claim to moral correctness and demonstrating social efficacy. This paper argues that law's social efficacy is not merely an observable fact but is undergirded by moral commitments by rulers that it is possible for their subjects to follow the rules, that the rulers and others will also follow the rules, that subjects will be protected from violence if they act in accordance with the rules, and that subjects will be entitled to legal redress if others act violently towards them otherwise than in accordance with the rules. Alexy is correct in his conclusion that a system of norms that is not by and large socially efficacious is not a valid legal system, but wrong insofar as he follows legal positivism in distinguishing this aspect of law's validity from law's claim to moral correctness

The ostensible arguments advanced by Oliver O’Donovan for a confessionally Christian constitutional order are not persuasive, even in the terms of his own scheme, because they presuppose that such a confession may be required as a representative act. Within his theory lies, however, the assumption that confessing Christ is fundamental to all right decision-making, including the political. This renders the confession of Christ not merely a possibility for legitimate governments but rather essential to just political judgments. If O’Donovan’s ostensible arguments prove too little, the underlying logic of his position claims too much. O’Donovan is mistaken in his assumption that political judgments must be placed within the same comprehensive moral vision as personal decisions. Because political judgments bear only an indirect relationship to absolute right they may be rightly made without the express confession of Christ in the constitutional order

A commitment to the rule of law is a commitment to the governance of a society through the use of general or generalisable rules which are binding on both the subjects and the rulers. By giving due notice of the rules and of any changes to them, those who are subject to the law are protected from violence and enabled to act as agents. This is the essential contribution the rule of law makes to important human goods including freedom. Such an understanding of the rule of law illuminates why the law-like character of God and the revelation of God’s law make human free will meaningful and a relationship of love between God and human beings possible. A commitment to the rule of law also means that those exercising power have to offer justifications to explain why the rules are binding, which opens up space for debate about whether the rules are just