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Abstract
The received conventional wisdom from Paul in the New Testament is deceptively simple: law imprisons but love liberates. If we separate the chaff from the wheat, we will discover a grain of truth in this received wisdom. The purpose of this paper is to separate the chaff from the wheat. In what way does law imprison and in what way does love liberate? It will examine the relationship between law, love and freedom. It argues that while law reduces one's freedom in a sense, it reconstitutes it in another sense. Law does not imprison in any straightforward way. Love, too, does not liberate in any straightforward way. Love is a free act that restricts one's freedom.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Letter to the Romans 8:21 (Revised Standard Version).
2. Ibid., chs. 6–8 (RSV).
3. Ibid., 7:6 (RSV).
4. Letter to the Galatians 5:1 (RSV).
5. Letter to the Romans 10:4 (RSV).
6. Letter to the Galatians 3:10–13 (RSV).
7. Ibid., 5:6 (RSV).
8. 1 Corinthians 13:1–8 (RSV).
9. Letter to the Romans 13:8–10 (RSV).
10. John Caputo, “Postcards from Paul: Subtraction versus Grafting,” in St Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John Caputo and Linda Alcoff (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 5.
11. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables [1862], trans. Norman Denny (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 200.
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, trans. John King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 64.
13. Letter to the Galatians 3:10–13 (RSV).
14. Hugo, Les Miserables, 1105.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 1104.
17. Ibid., 1106.
18. Llosa, Temptation of the Impossible, 77–8.
19. Paul Kahn, Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), xi–xii.
20. Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 111.
21. Kahn, Law and Love, 173.
22. John Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence or the Philosophy of Positive Law, Vol. 1, ed. Robert Campbell (London: John Murray, 1885), 32; Jeremy Waldron, “Dead to the Law: Paul's Antinomianism,” Cardozo Law Review 28 (2006): 301, 305.
23. For an exegetical account of Paul's views, see Joshua Neoh, “Jurisprudence of Love in Paul's Letter to the Romans,” Law in Context 33 (2015): 7.
24. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 9.
25. Joseph Raz, “Authority, Law and Morality,” The Monist 68 (1985): 295, 300.
26. Scott Shapiro, Legality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 214.
27. Ibid., 216.
28. Nigel Simmonds, “Law as a Moral Idea,” University of Toronto Law Journal 55 (2005): 61, 66.
29. Nigel Simmonds, “Jurisprudence as a Moral and Historical Inquiry,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 18 (2005): 249, 263.
30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 574–75; Susan Mendus, “The Importance of Love in Rawls's Theory of Justice,” British Journal of Political Science 29 (1999): 57, 72.
31. Nigel Simmonds, “Reflexivity and the Idea of Law,” Jurisprudence 1 (2010): 1, 9.
32. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 573.
33. R. P. Wolff, “The Conflict between Authority and Autonomy,” in Authority, ed. Joseph Raz (New York: NYU Press, 1990), 26.
34. Neil McCormick, Institutions of Law: An Essay in Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 249.
35. Ibid.
36. Wolff, “Conflict between Authority and Autonomy,” 27.
37. Joseph Raz, Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 154.
38. Ibid., 131.
39. Ibid., 389.
40. Ibid., 204.
41. Philip Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (London: W. W. Norton, 2014).
42. Nigel Simmonds, Law as a Moral Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141.
43. Ibid., 142. Fuller's eight desiderata are generality, publicity, prospectivity, clarity, comprehensibility, obeyability, constancy, and congruence; Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964).
44. Simmonds, Law as a Moral Idea, 142.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Pettit, Just Freedom, 61.
48. Nigel Simmonds, “Property, Autonomy and Welfare,” Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 67 (1981): 61, 64.
49. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 154.
50. Ibid., 272.
51. Pettit, Just Freedom, 25.
52. Lon Fuller, “Human Interaction and the Law,” in The Principles of Social Order: Selected Essays of Lon L. Fuller, ed. Kenneth Winston (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), 234.
53. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6.
54. Wolff, “Conflict between Authority and Autonomy,” 20.
55. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 233.
56. Joseph Raz, “Introduction,” in Raz, Authority, 5.
57. Raz, Morality of Freedom, 37.
58. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 232.
59. Ibid., 245.
60. McCormick, Institutions of Law, 253.
61. Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51.
62. Ibid., 120.
63. Leslie Green, “The Forces of Law: Duty, Coercion and Power” (Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12/2015), 6–7.
64. McCormick, Institutions of Law, 251, 255.
65. Raz, Authority, 3.
66. Raz, Authority of Law, 26.
67. Raz, Morality of Freedom, 35.
68. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 260.
69. Raz, Authority, 15.
70. Simmonds, Law as a Moral Idea, 143.
71. Ibid., 186.
72. Ibid., 193.
73. Raz, Authority of Law, 170.
74. Simmonds, Law as a Moral Idea, 187.
75. For an analysis of republican freedom, as an exemplar of civic freedom, see Joshua Neoh, “Just Jurisprudence: Review of Philip Pettit's Just Freedom,” Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 40 (2015): 237.
76. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), ch. 6.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., ch. 8.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., 7. Emphasis added.
82. Steven Affeldt, “The Force of Freedom: Rousseau on Forcing to be Free,” Political Theory 27 (1999): 299, 299.
83. Ibid., 300.
84. Harry Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity and Love,” in Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129.
85. Ibid., 132.
86. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 142.
87. Ernest Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5–6.
88. John Gardner, “The Purity and Priority of Private Law,” University of Toronto Law Journal 46 (1996): 459, 459–60.
89. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18. Emphasis added.
90. Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 37.
91. Ibid., 39–40.
92. Harry Frankfurt, “On Caring,” in Necessity, Volition, and Love, 165.
93. Simon May, Love: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 254.
94. Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 46.
95. Ibid., 50.
96. Gospel of John 15:13 (RSV).
97. Raz, Morality of Freedom, 32.
98. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 407.
99. Ibid., 141.
100. Ibid., 143.
101. Ibid.
102. Raz, Morality of Freedom, 32.
103. For a close reading of this episode in the Book of Genesis, see Joshua Neoh, “Law and Love in Abraham's Binding of Isaac,” Law and Humanities 9 (2015): 237.
104. Gospel of John 14:15 (RSV).
105. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 405.
106. Ibid., 407.
107. Letter to the Galatians 2:20 (RSV).
108. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontent, trans. James Strachey (London: W. W. Norton, 1962), 12.
109. Mendus, “Importance of Love in Rawls's Theory of Justice,” 68.
110. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontent, 13.
111. Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 214.
112. Book of Genesis 2:24 (RSV). For an analysis of the primal and primordial scene of love in the Book of Genesis, see Joshua Neoh, “Law and Love in Eden,” in Law, Religion and Love, ed. Paul Babie and Vanja Savić (Routledge, 2017), 51.
113. Raz, Morality of Freedom, 33.
114. Ibid., 34.
115. Ibid.
116. Frankfurt, “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love,” 136.
117. Ibid., 141.
118. Robert Nozick, “Love's Bond,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 419.
119. Ibid., 424.
120. Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 61.
121. Book of Deuteronomy 6:5 (RSV).
122. May, Love, 26.
123. Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 55.
124. Gospel of Luke 22:42 (RSV).
125. Dante Alghieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Paradiso 3.85.
126. May, Love, 9.
127. Ibid., 36–37.
128. Rachel Adler, “The Battered Wife of God,” Review of Law and Women's Studies 7 (1998): 171, 186.
129. Renita Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995).
130. Adler, “Battered Wife of God,” 190.
131. May, Love, 37.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joshua Neoh
Joshua Neoh is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the Australian National University (ANU). He has read law at Cambridge, Yale and the ANU; and he has held visiting research positions at Oxford and Harvard. He is a philosopher of law and love. He is currently writing a book on Law, Love and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).