Are the Ten Commandments the foundation of the Anglo-Americanlegal system?

[JMHACLJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/17/2004 11:31:37 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
RJLipkin at aol.com writes:

> Surely, an exhaustive anthropology should reach back into those primitive 
> societies that survived because they embraced such rules as no killing, no 
> stealing, etc.  

Well, I wonder about this.  

Why should an anthropology of angles and saxons rely upon developments of 
neolithic cultures in the pacific rim?  And what of the cultures that survived 
because they adopted the no killing us, no stealing from us, versions of these 
rules.  

If you visit Washington, DC, take the public tour of the Supreme Court 
building.  If the docent does not proffer an explanation, inquire about those 
tables, centered over the Chief's head, that are numbered from 1 through 10:  "Are 
those the Ten Commandments?"  If you do, this is the reply you will get:  
"Actually, although numbered 1 through 10, those tables are intended by the artists 
to remind us of the moral codes common to all early societies."

That "interpretation" avoids complications that the ACLU might raise with the 
Court if the stock answer was that the tables represented the Ten 
Commandments and that the position of them above the Court and at the center of the bench 
symbolically acknowledge the superiority of God's law over man's and the 
centrality of God's law to the resolution of disputes over man's law.  But that 
raises lots of issues about what moral code was common to all early societies, 
and how limited the code would have to be in order to reach across the 
boundaries of varied early cultures, etc.

Jim Henderson
Senior Counsel
ACLJ
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