Moral Duty and the Rule of Law (Symposium: Law and Morality‪)‬

In his immortal play A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt provides a fictional account of an argument between Sir Thomas More, who served as the Chancellor of England and would later become the patron saint of lawyers and judges, and his son-in-law, William Roper. (1) Their argument is about the demands of fidelity to both law and morality. In the course of that argument, More pleads, "The law, Roper, the law. I know what's legal not what's right. And I'll stick to what's legal." (2) Roper then makes two provocative charges against More. First, Roper asserts to More, "Then you set man's law above God's!" (3) More responds in the negative: