Our contemporary debates about the nature of sex, marriage, and family life are not new.

A half millennium ago, the Protestant Reformation set off a comparably tumultuous sexual revolution that bitterly divided the Catholic and Protestant worlds.

Over the next century, jurists and theologians used various natural law theories to develop a common foundation for Western family law. In this essay the author samples the writings of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and English jurist John Selden (1684-1654) — two leading Protestant natural law theorists whose seminal writings helped to shape the Continental civil law and the Anglo-American common law traditions respectively.

CLICK HERE to read more.