Law and justice from a Christian viewpoint

A High Court Judge delivered a speech on law and justice from a Christian perspective at Warwick last Tuesday. Sir Justice Cooke became a High Court Justice in 2001 and has presided over numerous high-profile cases, including the 2007 royal blackmail plot, the trial of Roshanara Choudry for the stabbing of Stephen Timms MP, and the 2011 Pakistan cricket sport-fixing scandal.

Sir Jeremy argued in his speech that law must essentially come from God and denied the validity and logic of atheist perspectives, criticising in particular the views of Richard Dawkins and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens.

“There is no basis for justice without God,” he said. “I come at this from an unapologetically Christian perspective.”

The event was co-organised by the new Law and Sociology Society and the Christian Union (CU).

President of the CU Justin Hill said the talk was “a brilliant opportunity to have someone who is at the very top of their field come and talk about their faith, which is really useful when trying to tell people about Christianity because it helps deal with any misconceptions people have about the kind of people that are Christians.”

Xin Ling Mok, a third-year Law student who attended the talk, said: “I think it was very interesting and insightful because it’s the first time I’ve met a judge who thinks of justice in that way.”

However, Sir Justice Cooke’s views were attacked by several students in the Q&A session at the end of the talk. One member of the audience said: “I believe [justice] is socially constructed; it doesn’t come from God.”

Others questioned the lack of any evidence for God and why we bother with legal institutions if God can carry out justice better than we can.

Responding to these criticisms, Katie Hooper, the chief organiser of the event, replied: “I think these might have been more personal attacks than actually what they didn’t like about the talk.”

In an interview with the _Boar_ before the talk, Sir Jeremy spoke about how he thought cases involving religious extremism should be dealt with: “Such cases should must be dealt with in accordance with the law, but present particular problems” he said, “because religious extremists are often not amenable to reason nor consider themselves subject to law.”

When asked his opinion on David Cameron’s recent comment that the UK is a Christian country, he replied: “To call us a Christian society, I think, is a little optimistic. My own view is that the Christian principles that underline our law make really good sense and I would hope that people could be persuaded of that.”

Sir Justice Cooke said that his Christian views would not influence his professional judgements “to a very significant extent, because every judge is under obligation to apply the law of the land”.

“When you start looking at matters of human rights,” he said, “you then come at it from a slightly distinct Christian perspective. But other than that, for the most part, you’ll simply be applying the law.”