Law of Nature

Natural right is the deictate of right reason, shewing the moral turpitude, or moral necessity, of any act from its agreement or disagreement with a rational nature, and consequently that such an act is either forbidden or commanded by God, the author of nature.

We must farther remark, that natural right relates not only to those things that exist independent of the human will, but to many things, which necessarily follow the exercise of that will.

Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself.

There are some writers on the subject who attempt to evade the fundamental difficulty by contending that the code of Nature exists in the future and is the goal to which all civil laws are moving, but this is to reverse the assumptions on which the old theory rested, or rather perhaps to mix together two inconsistent theories.

Like all other deductions from the hypothesis of a Law Natural, and like the belief itself in a Law of Nature, it was languidly assented to and suffered to have little influence on opinion and practice until it passed out of the possession of the lawyers into that of the literary men of the eighteenth century and of the public which sat at their feet.

It is certainly doubtful whether the Romans were ever seriously threatened by it, but at any rate they had adequate protection in their theory of Natural Law.

But the principle of inheritance is a principle of natural law, founded on the presumption that, where a deceased person has left no evidence to the contrary, it was his will, (so long as he had his reason, and therefore so long as his will was of any legal importance,) that in that moment, (whenever it might arrive,) in which his property could no longer be useful to, nor be controlled by, himsel …

If, then, the principle of inheritance be a principle of natural law, it is as applicable to intellectual, as to material, property.

And my argument is, that if arbitrary power had never interfered to check the progress of knowledge, and to exercise absolute authority over the rights of inventors, as well as of others, this public sense of obligation, and this vague idea that an inventor should be paid, would long ago have found body and form in a well digested system of natural law, based on the principle of a man’s absolute r …

Natural law recognizes the validity of all contracts which men have a natural right to make, and which justice requires to be fulfilled:

If, then, law be a natural principle—one necessarily resulting from the very nature of man, and capable of being destroyed or changed only by destroying or changing the nature of man—it necessarily follows that it must be of higher and more inflexible obligation than any other rule of conduct, which the arbitrary will of any man, or combination of men, may attempt to establish.

There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured.

These principles were finally considered by the Roman lawyers to fit in with a Greek philosophical conception, the Law of Nature, which was destined to have a serious influence on human thought down to our own days.

but another and more striking piece of evidence is the rise of the conception of the Law of Nature, which is in truth law divorced from its penal sanctions.

Quinimo non solum contra ius naturale esset, velle impedire talem navigationem, sed etiam tenemur contrarium facere, hoc est, prodesse iis quibus possumus, cum id sine damno nostro fieri potest’.

Huius autem iuris naturalis partem esse ius gentium, primaevum quod dicitur, diversum a iure gentium secundario sive positivo, quorum posterius mutari potest.

Sicut et illud confitendum est, contra ius perpetuum naturae gentiumque, unde ista libertas originem sumpsit in omne tempus duratura, nullam valere Pontificis auctoritatem.

It was a principle of the Common Law, as it is of the law of nature, and of common sense, that no man can be taxed without his personal consent.

”* In short, the simple fact that the written law must be interpreted by the natural, is, of itself, a sufficient confession of the superior certainty of the latter.

There would be something like certainty in the administration [135] of justice, and in the popular knowledge of the law, for the further reason that there would be little legislation, and men’s rights would be left to stand almost solely upon the law of nature, or what was once called in England “the common law,” (before so much legislation and usurpation had become incorporated into the common la …

And if you know a law of nature (*nāmūs ṭabīʻī*), you infer by it what must inevitably come about by reason of that law.

for by induction we judge the general rule and are guided to the natural law (al-nāmūs al-ṭabīʻī), while by deduction we judge of individuals

Much more important were the relations of the Common Law with the cosmopolitan doctrine of the Law of Nature, certainly not the least notable product of medieval intellect.

All the Germanic virtues, in so far as they agree with the precepts and commendations of the Church, belong to the law of nature in the regular scholastic usage of the term:

and if it be objected that zealots for the law of nature have often advocated or carried out beneficial changes, the best reply is, that the law of nature has often been a name for the dictates of obvious expediency.

I call natural laws, those which nature dictates in all ages to all men, for the maintenance of that justice which she (say what they will of her) hath implanted in our hearts.

But the true and sovereign and manifest law they neither see nor make the guide of their life.

quia quod ad jus naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt, Dig.

) The ‘law of nature’ is, therefore, the ancient pre-Christian ingredient in the system, and the ‘Senchus Mor’ says of it:

If it be not a natural principle, all the appeals for justice that have ever been heard, and all the struggles for justice that have ever been witnessed, have been appeals and struggles for a mere fantasy, a vagary of the imagination, and not for a reality.

But if justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one;

If justice be not a natural principle, governments (so-called) have no more right or reason to take cognizance of it, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance of it, than they have to take cognizance, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance, of any other nonentity;

the Law of nature, and the King’s royal favour, he hopeth, will plead for his excuse;