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Natural Law

natural law, theory that some laws are basic and fundamental to human nature and are discoverable by human reason without reference to specific legislative enactments or judicial decisions. Natural law is opposed to positive law, which is human-made, conditioned by history, and subject to continuous change. The concept of natural law originated with the Greeks and received its most important formulation in Stoicism. The Stoics believed that the fundamental moral principles that underlie all the legal systems of different nations were reducible to the dictates of natural law. This idea became particularly important in Roman legal theory, which eventually came to recognize a common code regulating the conduct of all peoples and existing alongside the individual codes of specific places and times (see natural rights). Christian philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas perpetuated this idea, asserting that natural law was common to all peoples—Christian and non-Christian alike—while adding that revealed law gave Christians an additional guide for their actions. In modern times, the theory of natural law became the chief basis for the development by Hugo Grotius of the theory of international law. In the 17th cent., such philosophers as Spinoza and G. W. von Leibniz interpreted natural law as the basis of ethics and morality; in the 18th cent. the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, especially as interpreted during the French Revolution, made natural law a basis for democratic and egalitarian principles. The influence of natural law theory declined greatly in the 19th cent. under the impact of positivism, empiricism, and materialism. In the 20th cent., such thinkers as Jacques Maritain saw in natural law a necessary intellectual opposition to totalitarian theories.

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Sir Isaac Newton, physicist and mathematician.

REFERENCES

  • Buckle, Stephen, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • Finnis, John (ed.), Natural Law, New York: New York University Press, 1991.
  • Gierke, Otto, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500-1800, translated from the German by Ernest Barker, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934; 2nd edition, 1950(original edition, 4 vols, 1868-1913).
  • Nettheim, Garth, “Human Rights: People's Rights”, in The Rights of Peoples, edited by Crawford, James, Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
  • Ruby, Jane E., “The Origins of Scientific ‘Law’”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986): 341-59.
See more references from Credo

From Credo

  • Sargent, Rose-Mary, “Scientific Experiment and Legal Expertise: The Way of Experience in Seventeenth-Century England”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 20/1 (1989): 19-45.
  • Shapiro, Barbara J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
  • Tuck, Richard, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
  • Buckle, Stephen, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume, Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • Gierke, Otto Friedrich von, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, translated from the German by Ernest Barker, 2. vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934; I vol., Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 (German original, 1913).
  • Haakonssen, Knud, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  • Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2. vols, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978-79.
  • Tuck, Richard, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
  • Tully, James, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.