Law as a Universal Force for Good

Abstract

This chapter covers the early years of Tanaka’s career as a law professor (1923–1930), a pivotal period when Tanaka got married, converted to Catholicism, and wrote his first book, one of his most important, on Law, Religion and Social Life (1927). Building on his discovery of universality in the principles of commercial law, it shows how Tanaka’s Christian understanding of the dualism of Man as caught between the flesh and the spirit led him to a broader understanding of law as not a necessary evil but as a social and moral good. In Law, Religion and Social Life, he drew on the lessons of President Calles’s persecution of Catholics in Mexico to argue that Japanese also must resist efforts to pass laws that would restrict religious freedom, a point he reinforced with references to Pope Pius X’s Vehementer Nos.