Authority, the Voluntary, and the Coercion of Belief

This paper discusses legal authority and its relation to belief, including religious belief. Modern jurisprudence is dominated by a model of legal authority as coordinative in function, and as directive of the voluntary – of what is subject to the will and to command. Coercive legal direction, the imposition of legal obligations backed by threats of sanction, is of what we can do or refrain from at will, just in response to a command and as a means to avoiding sanction. This coordinative model that ties legal direction to the voluntary goes back to Hobbes. By contrast, the paper argues, pre-modern natural law theory, the legal theory of early modern scholasticism as expounded by writers such as Molina and Suarez, viewed legal authority as educative. Legal authority serves to teach and communicate, concerning the common good. On this educative model of authority, legal directives witness to truth, about that common good and what would damage it.

Coercion (linguistics) · Jurisprudence · Legal culture · Legal profession · Legal realism · Legal research · Philosophy of law · Relation (database) · Subject (documents) · Witness · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Historical Legal Studies and Society · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought