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I SWEAR TO IT: OATHS AS FUNDAMENTAL LANGUAGE AND POWER

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The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, By GiorgioAgamben, trans. AdamKotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. 72. $16.95 (paper). ISBN: 9780804768986.
Oaths and the English Reformation. By Jonathan MichaelGray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 286. $109.99 (cloth). ISBN: 9781107018020.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2016

Jeffrey B. Hammond
Jeffrey B. Hammond*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Law, Faulkner University, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law
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Extract

Edward Snowden, the systems analyst employed by a contractor for the United States National Security Agency, violated his contractual obligation to guard the nation's secrets and security procedures out of what he has argued was a higher obligation to preserve the privacy guaranteed to Americans by the United States Constitution and a conscientious objection to withholding information about violations of that privacy. Conscience can be conceived as a disposition of heart, mind, and will to act or refuse to act in the face of contravening authority, for what is a superior good in the mind of the actor, and always with the willingness to suffer for one's action or inaction. Snowden ultimately sought to divulge and disrupt programs of intelligence gathering and national security because of his convictions regarding nobler American ideals of liberty and privacy.

Keywords

oathsoath-swearingEnglish Reformationconscience
Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 92 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2016 

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References

1 Amy Davidson, “Did Edward Snowden Break His Oath?,” New Yorker, January 5, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/did-edward-snowden-break-his-oath.

2 Matt Smith, “NSA Leaker Comes Forward, Warns of Agency's Existential Threat,” CNN, June 9, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/09/politics/nsa-leak-identity.

3 “Message from the Director: Former Officer Convicted in Leak Case,” October 23, 2012, https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/2012-press-releasese-statements/statement--former-officer-convicted.html.

4 Quoting Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 3.104.

5 Quoting Emile Benveniste, “Le blasphème et l'euphémie” [Blasphemy and euphemism], in Problèmes de linguistique général (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 2:256.

6 Quoting David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999), 61. Gray cites many scholars who either gave superficial treatment to oaths, contended that they were not important to the Reformation, or not beneficial to Henry's program, “useful only to the extent that they ‘made people solemnly aware of their new duty’” (9, quoting Geoffrey R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 230).

7 For an example in the health law context, see Hammond, Jeffrey B., “Conscience as Contract. Conscience as Covenant,” Faulkner Law Review 4 (2012–2013): 433–44Google Scholar.