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Reason, Revelation, and the Law of Nature in James Wilson’s Lectures on Law

One unresolved question in the scholarship on James Wilson concerns the relationship between his natural law jurisprudence and Christianity. Engaging that debate, this article marshals evidence for the continuity of Wilson’s lectures with the Christian natural law tradition. Indeed, Wilson’s lectures offer a vision of founding-era jurisprudence that is self-consciously rooted in a divinely created and rationally intelligible moral order that is both complemented and presupposed by Christian revelation. By highlighting the essential continuity between the Christian natural law tradition and the first and most prominent lectures on early American jurisprudence, this article challenges a common interpretive framework that sees the founding in general, and Wilson’s lectures in particular, as subtly subversive of Christianity.