Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2023
Abstract
According to legend, someone asked literary giant Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, whether he believed in infant baptism. He replied that, not only did he believe in it, he’d seen it done. Hundreds of generations of lawyers and jurists, including many of the most influential legal scholars and judges in history, have believed in natural law for the same reason. And many still do.
Natural law and natural rights are not “nonsense on stilts,” as Jeremy Bentham famously dismissed them.1 Natural law reasoning is what lawyers and judges do every day. Today, many people tend to think of natural law and natural rights primarily as external constraints on political power whose success depends on a prior belief in God or some other higher power. But for most of the history of theorizing about natural law, philosophers and jurists have understood that, as Edward Corwin put it, natural law confers “its chief benefits by entering into the more deliberate acts of human authority.”2 Natural law supplies basic principles and maxims, and natural rights supply particular presumptions and premises, to make legal reasoning and adjudication rational, accessible to the intellects of those persons whom law is supposed to govern, and legally just.
Recommended Citation
Adam J. MacLeod, The Bare Necessity of Natural Law, 2023 J. Christian Legal Thought 13 (2023).
