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Natural Law And Legal Positivism In The Nuremberg Trials, Judah B. Murray

Senior Honors Theses

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how a natural law based jurisprudential philosophy would have proved superior to the Austinian legal positivist prepositions that the Allies worked from in the Nuremberg Trials. This is achieved through defining natural law as it was classically understood by its historical advocates such as Thomas Aquinas and Sir William Blackstone. Natural law’s applicability to the Trials builds off the principles articulated by those writers. In the process of making this determination, as to why natural law represents a viable jurisprudential idea, this paper addresses the fundamental conflict between natural law and …

The Natural Complexity Of Patent Eligibility, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

It has long been assumed that the doctrine of patent eligibility’s prohibition of patents on “laws of nature,” “natural phenomena,” and “products of nature” rests on legalistic interpretations of those terms. But there is good reason to doubt this assumption. Since the doctrine’s inception, the Supreme Court has yet to provide any framework, formula, or factors explaining these “natural” terms. Rather, the Court has increasingly fixated on a list of scientific tropes, such as gravity, the heat of the Sun, and extracted metals, that it believes are true examples of “natural laws,” “phenomena,” and “products.”

An actual examination of scientific …

The Charter Of The Forest: Evolving Human Rights In Nature, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Carta de Foresta, the Charter of the Forest of 1217, is among the first statutes in environmental law of any nation. Crafted to reform patently unjust governance of natural resources in 13th century England, the Charter of the Forest became a framework through which to reconcile competing environmental claims, then and into the future. The Charter confirmed the rights of “free men.” Kings resisted conceding these rights. When confronted with violation of the Charter, barons and royal councils obliged kings repeatedly to reissue the Forest Charter and pledge anew to obey its terms.

Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen

Articles

William Blackstone is often identified as a natural law thinker for whom property rights were preeminent, but reading the Commentaries complicates that description. I propose that Blackstone’s concept of law is more concerned with human invention and artifice than with human nature. At the start of his treatise, Blackstone identifies security, liberty and property as “absolute” rights that form the foundation of English law. But while security and liberty are “inherent by nature in every individual” and “strictly natural,” Blackstone is only willing to say that “private property is probably founded in nature.” Moreover, Blackstone is clear that there is …

Law As Fact And As Reason For Action: A Response To Robert Alexy On Law's 'Ideal Dimension', John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

Robert Alexy’s 2013 Natural Law Lecture, published in vol. 58 of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, presents law as having two dimensions, ideal and real, and thus a dual nature, to be elucidated by a conceptual analysis distinguishing between the observer’s and the participant’s perspective. It argues on this basis for a “non-positivist” theory of law that is “inclusive” in that it classifies some unjust laws as laws, but not all (and is thus not “super-inclusive”); it rejects the “exclusive non-positivism” that would treat every injustice in a law’s making or content as excluding it from the class of valid …