Law Commons^™

When The Pursuit Of Liberty Collides With The Rule Of Law, Rena Lindevaldsen

Faculty Publications and Presentations

In his 1979 article, Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, Arthur Leff argued that in the absence of a god-grounded ethical and legal system, “there cannot be any normative system ultimately based on anything except human will.” Stated differently, any human determination of what is moral that is separated from the unchanging moral standard of God is arbitrary and, likely, inconsistent. The difficulty with a human-will based system is that either each person is morally autonomous, in which case no government rules contradicting the individual's moral determination could be justified, or the will of the majority constitutes what is right, in which …