Romans 13:1–7 has been the most important text in scripture for Christian reflection on political authority, yet what it does not say has left Christian social ethicists and political/legal theorists with many lingering questions, especially about the proper response to unjust magistrates. To what resources should Christian thinkers look to illumine the gaps left by the Pauline silence, and just how absolute or relative did Paul intend his remarks in Romans 13:1–7 to be? This article presents a twofold thesis in response to this twofold question. First, it argues that the Noahic covenant, Genesis 8:21–9:17, is an important, although overlooked, background resource for interpreting Romans 13:1–7. Second, this article illustrates the practical benefit of reading Romans 13 in light of the Noahic covenant by offering a new argument for why Christians should not interpret Paul's unqualified command to submit to civil authorities as absolutely forbidding resistance to unjust magistrates. Paul's words about magistrates in Romans 13 have not superseded the obligation to pursue justice that God gave to the human community as a whole in the Noahic covenant. Thus the primal obligation resting in the people implicitly qualifies Paul's instructions.

The salience of rights talk in Western cultures has generated constructive responses from various religious traditions. This article contributes to this religious hermeneutic by turning to the first-generation Spanish theologians of the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, as important resources for Christian rights talk. These late scholastic thinkers made the image of God doctrine, as transmitted by Thomas Aquinas, the basis for affirming the worth and human natural rights of Amerindian peoples. To highlight the contemporary relevance of the school, the article engages Nicholas Wolterstorff's recent work on rights and his twofold critique of a capacities approach to human dignity and a virtues approach to justice. The School of Salamanca not only addresses the important concerns raised by Wolterstorff but uniquely offers a view of rights inextricably linked to human capacities and Christian virtue that highlights both the patient and agential dimensions of justice. They provide a critical theological challenge to the dominant secular liberal view of rights in a way that Wolterstorff's account does not.

The question of the sources of legal normativity continues to haunt legal theorists to this day. While it is largely uncontroversial that modern legal systems claim to produce normative propositions, whether or not there are independent reasons to obey the law remains a contested issue. Those views, as varied as they may be, appear to largely agree that the law is a social phenomenon of definite ontological presence. In this article, I argue, through an analysis of the theories of three prominent ninth- to eleventh-century Muslim jurists, that early Muslim theories of lawmaking did not incorporate any ontologically coherent concept of law. Rather, lawmaking was understood as the case-by-case formulation of legal opinions by individual jurists who were presumed to be driven by the same moral drive, and therefore occupy the same moral order, as all subjects of law. In spite of this ad hoc epistemological view, Islamic jurisprudence conceived of legal pronouncements as fully normative. The normativity of those unstructured ad hoc individual pronouncements, I maintain, is the result of the centrality of moral purpose to early Muslim theories of law. It was the presumption of a common moral drive that gave the legal system structural coherence and allowed the advancement of those pronouncements as normative claims. Whereas recent historical and anthropological work shows that moral motivation was central to the manner in which sharīʿa operated as a system of social regulation, this article argues, along the same lines, that the pietistic drive was both conceptually and structurally indispensable for the normative coherence of early Islamic jurisprudence.

Among the many individuals and groups espousing affiliation with the Moorish Science Temple of America movement, some continue founding prophet Noble Drew Ali's emphasis on engaging in American citizenship as a religious duty, while others interpret the prophet's scriptures to lend authority to claims of being outside the jurisdiction of American legal authority. Such sovereign Moors, whose actions range from declaration of secession to rejection of drivers or marriage licenses, advance legal discourse rooted in historical narratives, tailor their legal thinking toward practical instruction and efficacious results, and appeal to etymology to further authorize their claims. Such sovereign Moorish legal discourse is best understood, following Catherine Wessinger's work on the Montana Freemen, as “magical,” and understanding the magical role played by legal texts and discourse within these communities can help scholars and legal professionals in their approach to and interactions with sovereign Moors.

Edward Snowden, the systems analyst employed by a contractor for the United States National Security Agency, violated his contractual obligation to guard the nation's secrets and security procedures out of what he has argued was a higher obligation to preserve the privacy guaranteed to Americans by the United States Constitution and a conscientious objection to withholding information about violations of that privacy. Conscience can be conceived as a disposition of heart, mind, and will to act or refuse to act in the face of contravening authority, for what is a superior good in the mind of the actor, and always with the willingness to suffer for one's action or inaction. Snowden ultimately sought to divulge and disrupt programs of intelligence gathering and national security because of his convictions regarding nobler American ideals of liberty and privacy.