Public Discourse has published an outstanding essay—“The Judicial Oath and the Judgment of History”— by Eleventh Circuit chief judge William H. Pryor Jr. The essay is adapted from the Rice-Hasson Lecture that Judge Pryor delivered at Notre Dame Law School in November.

Pryor undertakes to “refute a contemporary misconception about the judicial role”—the “insidious modern refrain” that judges should concern themselves with the “so-called judgment of history.” As Pryor explains:

Judges swear before God to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States wherever it leads. We do not swear to follow a prediction or speculation about what future generations will favor….

When someone argues that the so-called judgment of history matters in some case, he betrays his desired result in a high-profile controversy regardless of what the judge’s oath to uphold the law requires. But asking how future generations will view us is a fool’s errand. The person who asks that question is only projecting his hope about what future generations will think. Yet no one knows whether future generations will be wise or wicked. Nor do we know whether they will be any less divided in their views than previous generations have been….

St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers and judges, provides the right role model for public duty. Remember that St. Thomas More was executed because he refused to take a false oath. He refused to swear to the supremacy of the King over the Church, and as he explained a moment before his execution, he “die[d] the King’s good servant and God’s first.” St. Thomas More understood that an oath has eternal consequences. His elite contemporaries, in contrast, thought that they stood on the right side of the King and of English history. As Hilaire Belloc once put it, Thomas More’s peers thought he was “a crank.” But St. Thomas More understood that Christians are called to be what St. Paul described (1 Cor. 4:10) as “fools for Christ.” Jesus said (Luke 14:26), “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” So my oath, with God as witness, to uphold the rule of law must matter more than the judgment of any peer or historian.