Law and Custom

The Author: David VanDrunen received his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law and his Ph.D. from Loyola University Chicago. He serves as Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Theological Seminary in California.

«'Law and Custom: The Thought of Thomas Aquinas and the Future of the Common Law' stands a good chance of being one of the most important books written on jurisprudence, legal history, and theology in the twenty-first century. The American legal academy and courts are slowly realizing that the twentieth century's dominant school of jurisprudence - legal realism - is deeply flawed, and that its triumph in the law schools, courts, and legislatures led to an era in which the law was sadly out of step with the community, and in which its implementation often resulted in exacerbating rather than solving social problems. David VanDrunen, in this meticulously researched and boldly argued book, offers us a different vision, one based on the natural law of Thomas Aquinas and the Anglo-American tradition of common law decision-making. Our framers believed that there could be no order without law, no law without morality, and no morality without religion. This was the belief of Aquinas as well, and if VanDrunen's fine book helps lead to a renewal of this belief among lawyers and legal philosophers in our time, he will have rendered a service that only someone superbly competent in theology and law could have performed. This is a book we've been waiting for, and it will be of profound and equal interest to lawyers, legislators, and philosophers.» (Stephen B. Presser, Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History, Northwestern University School of Law)
«Thomas Aquinas's rich theology of law has been pored over by innumerable scholars over the years, but his insights into the role custom plays in the praxis of law abiding have been largely unnoticed. This serious lacuna has been now filled in by this competent, welcome book by David VanDrunen. Law that is out of touch with the moral intuitions of the populace, as expressed by their customs, becomes formal and alienating to a people. Happily, this book also connects this issue of custom to the Anglo-American common law tradition.»