Christian Legal Education: From Bologna to Lynchburg and Beyond

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Abstract

From a historical perspective of the last millennium, the founding of Liberty University School of Law—a school committed to establishing the Christian foundation for legal education—in 2004 is not a historical anomaly; it is the norm. A major catalyst for the birth of what Harold J. Berman calls the Western legal tradition was the Papal Revolution of the eleventh century, which established the church’s independence from civil authorities. The founding of a law school in Bologna, Italy, was coincident with that revolution. Especially in the past 150 years, that developing legal tradition, based on the foundations of a fundamentally Christian worldview, has been severely challenged.

From its home in Lynchburg, Virginia, Liberty’s law school has responded to the views and movements that have worked to undermine the characteristics of the Western legal tradition that have provided the ideology and institutions supporting the rule of law. From its inception, the law school has sought to address several problems generally recognized in contemporary legal education as well as misperceptions about Christian legal education. However, the program of legal education at Liberty is not essentially reactive. This Article describes with some particularity the comprehensive and practical implementation of a vision of Christian legal education that attempts to integrate the jurisprudential, doctrinal, skills, and professionalism components of the curriculum as a model for other law schools—those beyond Lynchburg.

The formal changes to American legal education that Christopher Columbus Langdell instituted at Harvard Law School in 1870 are emblematic of a more fundamental shift in modern jurisprudence. His attempt to adopt an evolutionary worldview, combined with an inductive-empirical methodology, undermined the rationality and objective basis for law. All too often, professors utilize Socratic dialogue, not as a means of discovering truth but of subverting belief in the rule of law—thus producing a cadre of legal Sophists. The restoration and development of the Western legal tradition will not be affected by a revival of Greco-Roman natural law or even a synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology but rather by the biblical philosophical-theological apologetics that the Apostle Paul modeled in his encounter with the pagan Greek philosopher in Athens.

Original languageUndefined/Unknown
JournalLiberty University Law Review
StatePublished - Jan 16 2025

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