I did read it. The point of a legal system is to prevent the cultural outcome besetting Ireland. Not to be relatively immune from the cultural wreckage all around it.
So what went wrong? Was the Constitution fundamentally liberal with a Catholic sheen?
Are the limits to any Constitutional order such that it cannot prevent the result we see in Ireland?
Do I want an explicitly Catholic social order as the goal of every institution? Yes. But let’s be honest and humble in our prescriptions. Ireland is a disaster and her Constitution either carried the seeds of its own destruction or was tasked with a goal it could not achieve. Learn from it seems the only option open to us.
I see what you’re saying, and I think I agree with part of it. That is, Law is a teacher, but in order to teach the classroom must be under a minimum of control. One cannot ask the jurists to be the sole bulwark against liberalism; the political realm more broadly has to be rightly ordered as well. Cheers!
And hence the formidable resistance from segments in the political realm that equate control and order with "authoritarianism". When the source of authority in alleged “authoritarianism" is the Church, control & order acquire the escalated Label of “theocracy” - a fatal violation of First Amendment Freedom of Religion (at least in US. I don't know anything about the Irish Constitution).There appears to be no way to stop that Riverdance with dancers in circular formation, arms linked, jumping from one end of the stage to the other. Your work is very hard, Professor.
The Harvard Journal of Law and Policy essay mentioned in the post gives more examples of the Courts jurisprudence which, without the natural law tradition, would look considerably worse (it would probably look more like US and Canadian jurisprudence for instance).
No one is more down beat about Irelands current political predicament that I.
But it’s important to highlight both the State’s past triumphs and the long term benign impact they’ve had on legal practice.
I simply can’t find much of a silver lining here, beyond the fact that Ireland is mission territory for the very Nigerian priests who were converted by Irish missionaries.
Yet, Ireland has been subsumed into the liberal orbit and completely colonized.
You didn’t even read to the end of the post.
I did read it. The point of a legal system is to prevent the cultural outcome besetting Ireland. Not to be relatively immune from the cultural wreckage all around it.
So what went wrong? Was the Constitution fundamentally liberal with a Catholic sheen?
Are the limits to any Constitutional order such that it cannot prevent the result we see in Ireland?
Do I want an explicitly Catholic social order as the goal of every institution? Yes. But let’s be honest and humble in our prescriptions. Ireland is a disaster and her Constitution either carried the seeds of its own destruction or was tasked with a goal it could not achieve. Learn from it seems the only option open to us.
I see what you’re saying, and I think I agree with part of it. That is, Law is a teacher, but in order to teach the classroom must be under a minimum of control. One cannot ask the jurists to be the sole bulwark against liberalism; the political realm more broadly has to be rightly ordered as well. Cheers!
And hence the formidable resistance from segments in the political realm that equate control and order with "authoritarianism". When the source of authority in alleged “authoritarianism" is the Church, control & order acquire the escalated Label of “theocracy” - a fatal violation of First Amendment Freedom of Religion (at least in US. I don't know anything about the Irish Constitution).There appears to be no way to stop that Riverdance with dancers in circular formation, arms linked, jumping from one end of the stage to the other. Your work is very hard, Professor.
The Harvard Journal of Law and Policy essay mentioned in the post gives more examples of the Courts jurisprudence which, without the natural law tradition, would look considerably worse (it would probably look more like US and Canadian jurisprudence for instance).
No one is more down beat about Irelands current political predicament that I.
But it’s important to highlight both the State’s past triumphs and the long term benign impact they’ve had on legal practice.
I simply can’t find much of a silver lining here, beyond the fact that Ireland is mission territory for the very Nigerian priests who were converted by Irish missionaries.