The law of nature -- The common law -- The adoption of written constitutions -- The separation of law and religion -- The explosion in law publishing -- The two-sidedness of natural law -- The decline of natural law and custom --Substitutes for natural law -- Echoes of natural law.

Our age is characterized by radical subjectivism. Which is to say: There is no agreement on any absolute standard of value. Indeed, there is no agreement even on truth itself. And as a matter of fact, the very concept of objective, absolute truth has been cast aside in favor of "truths" - your truth, my truth, whoever's truth. The result is the abandonment of the pursuit of truth at all, in favor of convictions, emotional appeals in favor of those convictions, and the pursuit of political power to put those convictions in practice. This state of affairs will come as no surprise to those, like Friedrich Julius Stahl, who track the way people think, who know that ideas have consequences and that thought eventually feeds into practice. This is especially the case with legal philosophy. Here is where theory and practice confront each other, where the rubber meets the road. And the history of legal philosophy is the history of ideas having consequences. This history can tell us a great deal about how we arrived at the current state of affairs. When we look at it, we find that the key player in this history is natural law. Once the mainstay of ethical and legal discourse, it is now a forgotten relic. But natural law paved the way for the triumph of subjectivism in the modern world. A strange thing, considering that natural law was supposed to embody an objective standard for judging man-made law. It ended up eliminating that standard. How this came about is the burden of The Rise and Fall of Natural Law. Natural law was born of the Greeks and Romans, adopted by the Christian church, and converted into the bulwark of Christian ethical and legal science. But along the way it became disengaged from the church; and when it did, it played a central role in secularizing Western civilization. Stahl follows this career, from its start in classical antiquity, through to its incorporation in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, to its secularized versions in the Enlightenment, and culminating in the philosophy of Rousseau and the hard reality of the French Revolution. The subjectivist turn is especially emphasized in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subject makes him the prophet of the modern world. Although Fichte wrote at the turn of the 19th century, it is in our day that his orientation has triumphed. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him - the leading characters in "the Rise and Fall of Natural Law" - are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world.

Our age is characterized by radical subjectivism. Which is to say: There is no agreement on any absolute standard of value. Indeed, there is no agreement even on truth itself. And as a matter of fact, the very concept of objective, absolute truth has been cast aside in favor of “truths” – your truth, my truth, whoever’s truth. The result is the abandonment of the pursuit of truth at all, in favor of convictions, emotional appeals in favor of those convictions, and the pursuit of political power to put those convictions in practice. This state of affairs will come as no surprise to those, like Friedrich Julius Stahl, who track the way people think, who know that ideas have consequences and that thought eventually feeds into practice. This is especially the case with legal philosophy. Here is where theory and practice confront each other, where the rubber meets the road. And the history of legal philosophy is the history of ideas having consequences. This history can tell us a great deal about how we arrived at the current state of affairs. When we look at it, we find that the key player in this history is natural law. Once the mainstay of ethical and legal discourse, it is now a forgotten relic. But natural law paved the way for the triumph of subjectivism in the modern world. A strange thing, considering that natural law was supposed to embody an objective standard for judging man-made law. It ended up eliminating that standard. How this came about is the burden of The Rise and Fall of Natural Law. Natural law was born of the Greeks and Romans, adopted by the Christian church, and converted into the bulwark of Christian ethical and legal science. But along the way it became disengaged from the church; and when it did, it played a central role in secularizing Western civilization. Stahl follows this career, from its start in classical antiquity, through to its incorporation in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, to its secularized versions in the Enlightenment, and culminating in the philosophy of Rousseau and the hard reality of the French Revolution. The subjectivist turn is especially emphasized in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subject makes him the prophet of the modern world. Although Fichte wrote at the turn of the 19th century, it is in our day that his orientation has triumphed. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him – the leading characters in “the Rise and Fall of Natural Law” – are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world.

The theory of natural law grounds human laws in the universal truths of God’s creation. Until very recently, lawyers in the Western tradition studied natural law as part of their training, and the task of the judicial system was to put its tenets into concrete form, building an edifice of positive law on natural law’s foundations. Although much has been written about natural law in theory, surprisingly little has been said about how it has shaped legal practice. Natural Law in Court asks how lawyers and judges made and interpreted natural law arguments in England, Europe, and the United States, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the American Civil War. R. H. Helmholz sees a remarkable consistency in how English, Continental, and early American jurisprudence understood and applied natural law in cases ranging from family law and inheritance to criminal and commercial law. Despite differences in their judicial systems, natural law was treated across the board as the source of positive law, not its rival. The idea that no person should be condemned without a day in court, or that penalties should be proportional to the crime committed, or that self-preservation confers the right to protect oneself against attacks are valuable legal rules that originate in natural law. From a historical perspective, Helmholz concludes, natural law has advanced the cause of justice.

The Problem of Natural Law examines the understanding of conscience offered by Thomas Aquinas, who provided the classic statement of natural law. The book suggests that natural law theory could be improved by bracketing Thomistic conscience and then shows how a natural law pos...

In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in discrediting natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science". Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality.

John Finnis's proposal to rehabilitate Aquinas's natural law theory as an appropriate foundation of legal and moral theory rests on the assumption that Aquinas's theory can be restored by eliminating the mistaken interpretations of subsequent natural law theorists. This book challenges that assumption. After a brief analysis of Aquinas, the theories of Suárez, Grotius, and Pufendorf are investigated. It is argued that their theories are no 'mistakes', but attempts at solving problems inherent in natural law theory. As these attempts all fail, tensions remain, and ultimately lead to the demise of the theory. Finally it is argued that Finnis, running into the same problems, cannot hope to restore Aquinas's theoretical edifice.

Natural law, according to Thomas Aquinas, has its foundation in the evidence and operation of natural, human reason. Its primary precepts are self-evident. Awareness of these precepts does not presuppose knowledge of, or even belief in, the existence of God. The most interesting criticisms of Thomas Aquinas’s natural-law teaching in modern times have been advanced by the political philosopher Leo Strauss and his followers. The purpose of this book is to show that these criticisms are based on misunderstandings and that they are inconclusive at best. Thomas Aquinas’s natural-law teaching is fully rational. It is accessible to man as man.

Originally published in German in 1936, The Natural Law is the first work to clarify the differences between traditional natural law as represented in the writings of Cicero, Aquinas, and Hooker and the revolutionary doctrines of natural rights espoused by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Beginning with the legacies of Greek and Roman life and thought, Rommen traces the natural law tradition to its displacement by legal positivism and concludes with what the author calls "the reappearance" of natural law thought in more recent times. In seven chapters each Rommen explores "The History of the Idea of Natural Law" and "The Philosophy and Content of the Natural Law." In his introduction, Russell Hittinger places Rommen's work in the context of contemporary debate on the relevance of natural law to philosophical inquiry and constitutional interpretation. Heinrich Rommen (1897–1967) taught in Germany and England before concluding his distinguished scholarly career at Georgetown University. Russell Hittinger is William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa.

This book develops a general theory of law, inclusive legal positivism, which seeks to remain within the tradition represented by authors such as Austin, Hart, MacCormick, and Raz, while sharing some of the virtues of both classical and modern theories of natural law, as represented by authors such as Aquinas, Fuller, Finnis, and Dworkin. Its central theoretical questions are: Does the existence or content of positive law ever depend on moral considerations? If so, is this fact consistent with legal positivism? The author shows how inclusive positivism allows one to answer yes to both of these questions. In addition to articulating and defending his own version of legal positivism, which is a refinement and development of the views of H.L.A. Hart as expressed in his classic book The Concept of Law, the author clarifies the terms of current jurisprudential debates about the nature of law. These debates are often clouded by failures to appreciate that different theorists are offering differing kinds of theories and attempting to answer different questions. There is also a failure, principally on the part of Ronald Dworkin, to characterize opposing theories correctly. The clarity of Waluchow's work will help to remove the confusion which has hitherto marred some jurisprudential debate, particularly about Dworkin's work.