Perspectives in Law                                                                       

                                                                                                                                         Vol. XI, No. 10, Nov/Dec 1998

For 105 years from 1765 till 1870 Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England was the standard text of law schools both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Blackstone predicated his analysis of law on the superiority of special biblical revelation, on a literal, six-day creation, on a literal Adam and fall resulting in the corruption of human reason, and on the Dominion Mandate of Genesis as the foundation of property law. And that Christian approach to law had begun centuries before Blackstone.

That millennium of Christian legal tradition came to an end in 1870 when Christopher Columbus Langdell, newly appointed dean of Harvard Law School, began a revolutionary approach to legal education based upon a philosophy rooted in Darwinism with an emphasis upon everything evolving, including the law.

In the Langdellian tradition the single most influential American jurist of the Twentieth Century was US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. His massive treatise, The Common Law, supplanted Blackstone’s Commentaries as the premier law school text.

For three decades, Holmes brought his distinctively Darwinian bias to the Court. He spoke candidly: "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." A consistent evolutionist, Holmes declared that "the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction." He authored the landmark decision in Buck v. Bell upholding a Virginia eugenics law mandating the involuntary sterilization of people the State deemed undesirable.

 It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

Holmes and his contemporaries laid the foundation for legalized abortion, no-fault divorce, the legalization of homosexuality, and the rejection of the Framers' vision for Constitutional interpretation. Today, most courts have embraced an evolving standard for Constitutional interpretation, rejecting the notion that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the meanings intended by the Framers.

Conclusion. For evil to triumph in the cultural battle, it is not necessary that the theory of evolution gain wide-spread acceptance, only that the assumptions behind the theory do. The battle between evolution and creation is comprehensive because it is a battle over lordship. The source of law will always be the true Lord of that civilization. Standards will never evolve because the Lawgiver never changes (Hebrews 13:18). His moral law for man can never change because it reflects the immutable character of a righteous, holy God. This standard was established from the beginning, is revealed in Scripture, and is eternally binding on civilizations. While specific application of these principles may change from culture to culture, the principles do not. Consequently, debates pertaining to separation of morality and politics, children's rights, overpopulation, environmentalism, homosexual marriage, education, capital punishment, and the purpose of the criminal justice system can only be properly addressed by building upon a Genesis foundation. Only armed with this foundation can Christians speak authoritatively to the defining issues of our day.

[Condensed from the September 1998 issue of Impact, by Douglas W. Phillips, and published by the Institute for Creation Research, P.O. Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92201. ICR is one of the foremost creation groups in the world and deserves our support. TCP]