Law’s True Empire: A Christian Natural Law Response to Professor Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin famously declared that Law's Empire is defined by attitude, not territory, raw power, or mere process. In his influential work, law is an interpretive enterprise, a community of principle where judges and citizens adopt the "interpretive attitude," seeking coherence, integrity, and the best moral reading of legal practices. Law, for Dworkin, emerges from constructive interpretation rather than from any transcendent source or fixed natural order.
This vision is elegant and attractive to modern minds. It flatters the interpretive class, judges, academics, and elites, granting them enormous creative power to shape society through principled attitude. Yet from a Christian natural law perspective, Dworkin's empire rests on sand. It lacks foundation. True law is not ultimately defined by human attitude. It is anchored in the eternal order of God's creation.
Dworkin's Interpretive Empire
Dworkin rejected both crude legal positivism (law is whatever the sovereign commands) and simple natural law. Instead, he proposed "law as integrity": judges must interpret the legal system as a coherent whole, extending principles of justice and fairness into new cases. The "attitude" — taking the law seriously as a moral enterprise — becomes the defining feature. Hercules, his ideal judge, weaves past decisions and moral philosophy into seamless justification.
This approach empowers flexible, evolving law. It suits liberal democracies where rights expand through judicial interpretation. But it also severs law from any objective anchor outside human reason and communal values. What counts as "integrity" or the "best" interpretation drifts with cultural attitudes. Yesterday's principle becomes today's injustice once elite opinion shifts.
The Christian Natural Law Counter
Christian natural law, drawing from Scripture, the Church Fathers, and especially St. Thomas Aquinas, offers a radically different foundation. Law's empire is not defined first by attitude, but by reality — the reality of a created order governed by divine reason.
Aquinas distinguished four kinds of law:
Eternal Law: God's rational governance of the universe.
Natural Law: Our participation in eternal law through reason. Basic precepts like "do good and avoid evil," the preservation of life, pursuit of truth, living in society, and rendering to each his due.
Human (Positive) Law: Derived from natural law, made by legitimate authority for the common good.
Divine Law: Revealed in Scripture to guide fallen humanity.
Human law derives its binding force not from interpretive elegance or judicial attitude, but from its conformity to natural law and ultimate orientation toward justice under God. A law contrary to natural moral order, such as one that attacks innocent life, undermines the family, or denies objective sexual reality, lacks true authority, even if supported by sophisticated judicial reasoning or prevailing elite attitudes.
Where Dworkin sees law as a conversation between past practices and present moral sensibilities, natural law insists law must reflect the logos, the rational order embedded in creation by the Divine Lawgiver. Attitude matters, but only insofar as it aligns with truth. A judge's "principled" interpretation that justifies grave moral evil is not integrity; it is sophistry.
Why This Matters Today
Dworkin's framework has helped fuel the modern tendency to treat law as a tool for social engineering and rights proliferation detached from duties, limits, and the created order. Issues such as no-fault divorce expansions, redefinitions of marriage and family, and judicial inventions around gender all reflect interpretive attitudes untethered from natural limits. The results — family breakdown, fatherlessness, and social fragmentation — are exactly what stoic, fatherly realism warns against.
A Christian natural law view demands more humility and realism from the legal system. Legislators and judges are not Hercules creating moral worlds; they are stewards accountable to a higher law. Good law strengthens the natural institutions God has given us: the family with father and mother, the dignity of work, protection of the vulnerable, rather than reimagining them according to shifting attitudes.
This does not mean rigid literalism or theocracy. Natural law reasoning is accessible to all people of reason. It provides a stable foundation for pluralistic societies while resisting the slide into relativism. It calls men, especially fathers and leaders, to stoic duty: uphold what is true and just, even when fashionable attitudes pull the other way.
Dworkin was right that law involves moral interpretation. He was wrong to make attitude the sovereign. In the Christian tradition, law's empire belongs ultimately to God, whose eternal law is written on the heart and revealed in creation and Scripture. Human attitudes must bow before this reality.
Australia, like much of the West, has drifted far into Dworkin's empire of attitude — flexible on family, migration outcomes, energy realism, and moral boundaries. The fruit is visible in social breakdown and policy failure. The remedy is not more creative interpretation, but a return to law grounded in natural order: objective, duty-oriented, and rational in its protective realism.
True justice requires more than attitude. It requires alignment with the Author of law itself.
