The Rhetoric of Precedent and Fulfillment in the Sermon on the Mount and the Common Law

Abstract

The intertwined rhetoric of precedent and fulfillment underlies the biblical rhetoric of the Sermon on the Mount and the legal rhetoric of the common law. This article wants to draw a parallelism between how Jesus approaches the corpus of Mosaic law in the Sermon on the Mount and how judges approach the corpus of the common law in case after case. Both Jesus and common law judges are fulfillers, not followers, of precedents. The follower of precedent repeats the norms of the past in the present, while the fulfiller of precedent redeems the norms of the past in the present.