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Full-Text Articles in Natural Law
Natural Lights & Natural Rights: The Problem Of The New Classical Natural Law Theory, Charles Neville Cacciatore
Natural Lights & Natural Rights: The Problem Of The New Classical Natural Law Theory, Charles Neville Cacciatore
LSU Master's Theses
The present work examines the natural law jurisprudence of John Finnis. It argues that Finnis’s teaching is a genuinely new natural law theory. Finnis’s jurisprudence is not a re- presentation of the jurisprudence of St. Thomas Aquinas because its central element—a doctrine of natural rights—is a departure from Aquinas’s natural law teaching. In support of these claims, the present work relies upon the scholarship of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. Following Fr. Fortin, it presents an understanding of the natural law that endorses a clear distinction between natural right and natural rights—between premodern political philosophy and modern political philosophy.
Law And Artifice In Blackstone's Commentaries, Jessie Allen
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 …
Breaking The Deadlock: Toward A Socialist-Confucianist Concept Of Human Rights For China, David E. Christensen
Breaking The Deadlock: Toward A Socialist-Confucianist Concept Of Human Rights For China, David E. Christensen
Michigan Journal of International Law
This Note offers an alternative perspective on international human rights that seeks to bypass the dead-end universalist-cultural relativist debate, and proposes a concept of human rights that is harmonious with the modern collectivist and socialist Chinese order. Since human rights protect dignity, this study finds the source of human dignity in China in society, not in nature. This analysis opens the door to the development of a meaningful set of guaranteed individual rights for a socialist state and a Confucian order.