That statement, while a cornerstone of Fundamentalist dogma, is false.

References to exactly why and how it is false:

HERE

and

HERE

and

HERE

for starters.

"American law is not based on the Ten Commandments, and nothing in the Constitution gives an Alabama judge a legal right to display the Decalogue in a court building, a group of legal historians and other scholars has advised a federal appeals court.

Forty-one law professors and legal historians weighed in on a lawsuit challenging Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore's display of the Ten Commandments in the state Judicial Building in Montgomery. The scholars were brought together by Steven K. Green, former legal director at Americans United and now law professor at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon.

The friend-of-the-court brief, filed April 28, musters ample historical evidence to debunk claims by Moore's attorneys that the judge has the right to display the Ten Commandments because they are the foundation of American law.

Nothing in the nation's legal history supports Moore's view, the legal scholars and historians say.

"Aside from a failed attempt in the seventeenth century to establish a biblically based legal system in the Puritan colonies, American law is generally viewed as having secular origins," asserts the brief.

The brief notes that "various documents and texts" figured in the development of American law, among them English common and statutory law, Roman law, the civil law of continental Europe and private international law."