"Jesus is Lord" and the Law

The various posts (here and here and here) about the United Church of Christ's recent resolutions reminded me of an article I hand out to my students every semester, "The Sign of the Cross and Jurisprudence," by Notre Dame's beloved contracts scholar, Ed Murphy (R.I.P.).  He wrote: 

Every class I have taught in Notre Dame Law School has begun with the same action and the same words. I have made the ancient Sign of the Cross, while saying: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."  What has this to do with law and legal education?  A good question.

He also noted, later on:

[T]here are many people who are receptive to the idea of Jesus Christ as Savior who experience difficulty with a necessary corollary, viz., Jesus Christ as Lord. Here one confronts the commands of the Savior, His laws, stipulations as to how we are to live our lives and how society should be governed. Indeed, there are professing Christians who insist that Christian morality and law pertain exclusively to personal salvation and should in no way be authoritative or determinative in areas of public policy. This is implicitly a denial of God's sovereignty and opens the way for "other gods" to rule the world. There are, of course, no shortage of "other gods" eager to oblige. By this view Jesus may be one's personal "savior," but He is not "lord" or "king." Jesus is thus rendered irrelevant to the world, and Christian influence in worldly matters becomes weak and impotent.

What does it mean, I wonder -- for those of us who are lawyers and legal scholars, living in a pluralistic, secular (i.e., not run by the Church), democracy -- that "Jesus is Lord"?

Rick