This is a collection of essays about ideas and the men who expressed them. Each chapter takes as its focus one of seventeen men who have grappled with ideas of authority and tradition, about the role of the church in the development of laws and legal institutions, and about the moral authority of lawmakers. Its editor tells us that this is ‘not a litany of judges and lawyers’ (xiii) and focuses instead on a selection of Irish jurists whose work grappled with the impact of Christianity on law. The criteria for inclusion are broad, leading to an unusual selection of chapter subjects. The ‘Irish’ dimension is given a wide interpretation, while the term ‘jurist’ encompasses lawyers, politicians, literary figures, church leaders, theologians and philosophers who contributed to legal discourse, legal institutions or legal sources. Given this breadth, it is striking that no woman was deemed suitable for inclusion as a subject. Brigid of Kildare, Frances Power Cobbe, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Iris Murdoch, and Mary McAleese are examples of Irish jurists who would have fit the brief.
The volume is part of a project led by John Witte Jr at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, focusing on Christian jurists in the western world. This collection of essays stems from a colloquium, held in Galway in 2024, at which three themes emerged: law as violence; the relationship between law and reason; and the role of virtue. The book, however, takes a chronological, rather than a thematic approach, and is divided into four parts beginning in the seventh century and ending in the twentieth.
The book opens in the pre-Anglo-Norman period with James W. Houlihan’s essay on Adomnán of Iona, the seventh-century author of Lex Innocentium, which established immunity from violence for certain non-combatant categories of people. Noémi Farkas then provides a rigorous analysis of De Rectoribus by Sedulius Scottus, a ninth-century Irish scholar who settled in Liège.
The second part of the book contains five chapters on the period of the Protestant Ascendancy. This includes chapters on Sir John Davies (by Robert Armstrong); Thomas Ryves (by Alan Ford); George Berkeley (by Kenneth L. Pearce) and Edmund Burke (by Samuel Burgess). Samuel L. Bray and D. N. Keane consider the legal thought of James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh and primate of the Church of Ireland, describing how his legal theories were often out of step with contemporary thinking.
Part three covers the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Daniel O’Connell’s relationship with the law is re-examined by Patrick Geoghegan. Clare O’Hare and William Olhausen write about barristers from different ends of the political spectrum (Patrick Pearse and Edward Carson), with Olhausen pointing out that Catholicism in early-twentieth-century Ireland was an important marker of national identity. Michael P. Moreland considers the philosophy of John Henry Newman. While not a lawyer, Moreland argues that Newman played a significant role in promoting the importance of the authority of ‘tradition’ in legal theory.
The final part of the book focuses on the twentieth century. Leonard F. Taylor evaluates John Charles McQuaid’s influence on Irish law and society as archbishop of Dublin from 1940 until 1972, before reflecting on recent re-evaluations of the social and legal culture that McQuaid helped to shape. Conor Casey demonstrates how Eamon de Valera’s constitutional thought was imbued with Christian values. Writers C. S. Lewis and James Joyce are included in this section, with authors Micah J. Watson and Nicholas J. McBride making strong cases for their inclusion as ‘jurists’. McBride points out that Ulysses and Finnegans wake revolve around the relationship between justice and mercy, a central concern of legal philosophers. David H. McIlroy’s chapter describes how Richard O’Sullivan argued in the early twentieth century that the common law was infused with values from Christian philosophy. Finally, James Chegwidden reflects on the wide-ranging work of theologian Herbert McCabe.
The individual authors include historians, legal academics, practising lawyers, clergy and theologians from Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Some provide a precis of previously published work while others present original scholarship. They differ in their approach, structure and use of sources, but each provides a biographical note as well as a bibliography, or a list of ‘recommended reading’ or ‘key works’. The book, therefore, serves as a useful introduction to numerous thinkers and intellectuals with curated reading lists for those who wish to dive deeper. While differences in structure, focus and citation conventions detract slightly from the cohesiveness of the book, it works well as a series of thoughtful reflections on the contributions and perspectives of these seventeen men. It is, therefore, a welcome addition to the growing literature on the interactions between law and religion in Ireland.
