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Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Natural Law
The Temptation Of Cosmic Private Law Theory, Nathan B. Oman
The Temptation Of Cosmic Private Law Theory, Nathan B. Oman
Faculty Publications
It’s a heady time to be a theorist of private law. After decades of vague post-Realist functionalism or reductive economic theories, the latest generation of private law theorists have provided a proliferation of new philosophies of tort, contract, and property. The result has been a tremendous burst of intellectual creativity. While Kant and Hegel have been dragooned into debates over torts and contracts and even such supposedly wooly headed thinkers as Coke and Blackstone have been rehabilitated, there have been fewer efforts to generate natural law accounts of private law than one might expect, particularly in light of the revival …
Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski
Reevaluating Legal Theory, Jeffrey Pojanowski
Journal Articles
Must a good general theory of law incorporate what is good for persons in general? This question has been at the center of methodological debates in general jurisprudence for decades. Answering “no,” Julie Dickson’s book Evaluation and Legal Theory offered both a clear and concise conspectus of positivist methodology, as well as a response to the longstanding objection that such an approach has to evaluate the data it studies rather than simply describe facts about legal systems. She agreed that legal positivism must evaluate. At the same time, she argued, it is possible to offer an evaluative theory of the …
Law As A Means To Human Flourishing: Law, Morality, And Natural Law In Policy-Oriented Perspective, Christian L. Gonzalez-Rivera
Law As A Means To Human Flourishing: Law, Morality, And Natural Law In Policy-Oriented Perspective, Christian L. Gonzalez-Rivera
Faculty Articles
Friendships can be uneasy without ceasing to be friendships. Because the "pie" of law and morality's relationship can be sliced in many ways and to different yields, in what follows, I consider the simultaneously unexplored, uneasy, and yet promising relationship between the Natural Law tradition and Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence (or "New Haven"), hoping that doing so will partially illuminate aspects of the relationship between morality and the law more generally. My aim is to describe what and how New Haven School founders Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell thought about Natural Law. As it will become clearer below, despite their critical appraisal …
Redrawing The Dividing Lines Between Natural Law And Positivism(S), Jeffrey Pojanowski
Redrawing The Dividing Lines Between Natural Law And Positivism(S), Jeffrey Pojanowski
Journal Articles
Anglo-American jurisprudence, before it insulated itself in conceptual analysis and defined itself in opposition to broader questions, was properly a “sociable science,” to use Professor Postema’s phrase from his symposium article. And, in part due to the exemplars of history, so it may become again. By drawing on Bentham and Hobbes, Professor Dan Priel’s Toward Classical Positivism points forward toward more fruitful methods of jurisprudence while illuminating the recent history and current state of inquiry. His article demonstrates the virtues and promise of a more catholic approach to jurisprudence. It also raises challenging questions about the direction to take this …
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 …
Rights, Communities, And Tradition, Brian Slattery
Rights, Communities, And Tradition, Brian Slattery
Articles & Book Chapters
This paper argues that there is a close connection between basic human rights and communal bonds. It criticizes the philosophical views of Alan Gewirth and Alasdair MacIntyre, which in differing ways deny this connection.
Allocating Risks And Suffering: Some Hidden Traps, John M. Finnis
Allocating Risks And Suffering: Some Hidden Traps, John M. Finnis
Journal Articles
The economic analysis of which Adam Smith is a principal founder is helpful in practical reasoning about problems of justice precisely insofar as it systematically calls attention to the side-effects of individual choices and actions and behavior. Still, it would be a mistake to conclude that we need only a more adequate account of the benefits and burdens up for distribution or allocation by those responsible for the common good or general fate. We need also to bear in mind what Smith did not forget and what economics does not comprehend, the requirements of commutative justice. To see this, we …
On Reason And Authority In Law's Empire, John M. Finnis
On Reason And Authority In Law's Empire, John M. Finnis
Journal Articles
Law's Empire will shape jurisprudence by its admirably resourceful attention to understanding a community's law "internally". It promotes reflective understanding of the practical argumentation constitutive of the attitude(s) in which that law subsists. But the book neglects some of practical understanding's resources of political and moral theory, and overestimates practical reasoning's power to identify options as the best and the right)
The "Natural Law Tradition", John M. Finnis
The "Natural Law Tradition", John M. Finnis
Journal Articles
This "tradition of natural law theory" has three main features: First, critique and rejection of ethical scepticism, dogmatism and conventionalism; Second, clarification of the methodology of descriptive and explanatory social theories (e.g., political science, economics, jurisprudence .... ); Third, critique and rejection of aggregative conceptions of the right and the just (e.g., consequentialism, utilitarianism, wealth-maximization, "proportionalism"...).
Developments In Judicial Jurisprudence, John M. Finnis
Developments In Judicial Jurisprudence, John M. Finnis
Journal Articles
The purpose of this Comment is to explore briefly the fundamentals of what Prof. H. L. A. Hart has called "the contribution offered by the judges to the jurisprudence of our day", and to indicate in outline the disparity between this contribution and those of the most recent academic writings.
Legal Sanctions, Jerome Hall
The Present Position Of Jurisprudence In The United States, Jerome Hall
The Present Position Of Jurisprudence In The United States, Jerome Hall
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.