John Witte and Rafael Domingo are coediting the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Christianity and the Law. One of the chapters will be on "Christianity and Equity," and my colleague Paul Miller and are writing it. There's a lot of terrain to cover--starting with Aristotle (yes, we know he's pre-Christian, but also formative for the later tradition), Roman law, the New Testament, scholastic theology, canon law, the Magisterial Reformation, and the English Court of Chancery. If you're interested in the ways the classical and Christian sources influenced the equity tradition, then you'll want to read it. If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like it.
Here's the link to our current draft.
The two implications we focus on are thinking of equity not just as a matter of public virtue, but also as a matter of personal virtue (for judges, lawyers, and litigants). And the value of holding on to the idea of conscience in equity. On that latter point we say this:
