Natural Law in Early Modern Legal Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ibbetson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Hugo Grotius

Natural law thinking in the early modern world had two principal roots: Greco-Roman moral philosophy and Roman law. These two strands came together in sixteenth-century Spain, from where they influenced the Dutchman Hugo Grotius. Grotius can be seen as the channel through which this thinking reached a pan-European audience. His works, and the works of his followers, came to have an enormous influence on the development of legal thought and practice after the seventeenth century. Ideas of natural law were no longer regarded as dependent on God’s will. A rational structure could be derived from self-evident premises in the law of nature and identification of concrete rules of natural law was regarded as the work of human reason. These features, coupled with its seeming moral objectivity, allowed natural law to provide a template for positive legal systems, and fuelled the move towards codification of law in eighteenth-century Europe.

The School of Salamanca

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Pagden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
School Of Salamanca ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ius Gentium ◽  
Francisco De Vitoria

The members of the so-called School of Salamanca (or “Second Scholastic,” as it is sometimes called) were, for the most part, the pupils, and the pupils of the pupils—from Domingo de Soto and Melchor Cano to the great Jesuit metaphysicians Luís de Molina and Francisco Suárez—of Francisco de Vitoria, who held the Prime Chair of Theology at Salamanca between 1526 and his death in 1546. Although they are often described vaguely as “theologians and jurists,” they were all, in fact, theologians. In the early modern world, theology, the “mother of sciences,” was considered to be above all other modes of inquiry, and covered everything that belongs to what today is called jurisprudence, as well as most of moral and political philosophy, and what would later become the human sciences. This article focuses on the Salamanca theologians' discussion of the law of nature—the ius naturae—and of the law of nations (ius gentium), for which reason Vitoria has often been referred to (along with Hugo Grotius) as the “father of international law.”

Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf on Last Wills and Testaments

Grotiana ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-164
Author(s):  
Raphael Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Internal Consistency ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Law System ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Previous Claim ◽  
The Law

Hugo Grotius believed that last wills belonged to the Law of Nature, whereas Samuel Pufendorf argued that testamentary succession was a mere creation of human laws. I argue that Pufendorf’s rejection of the Natural Law origins for wills lacks internal consistency in both his Natural Law system and his proprietary rights theory. Pufendorf even contradicts his own previous claim stating wills are recognised by the Law of Nature as useful to the promotion of social peace. Grotius’s analysis of testaments, on the other hand, brief though it may be, is entirely consistent with his previous arguments: that the Law of Nature can attach itself to human creation; and that a human creation such as testamentary succession belongs to Natural Law when derived from, or when it agrees with, human reason and sociability.

Cardinal Richelieu between Vattel and Machiavelli

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Carty
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Rule Of Reason

The view that no form of international law existed in seventeenth-century France, and that this time was a part of ‘prehistory’, and thus irrelevant for international legal thought today is challenged. In addition, the traditional claim of Richelieu to be an admirer of Machiavelli and his Ragion di Stato doctrine to the detriment of the aim of concluding treaties and keeping them (as sacred), is refuted by careful historical research. In Richelieu’s thinking, there is a role for law to play but it is law as justice, law in the classical natural law tradition. Those who rule are subject to the rule of law as justice, the rule of God, or the rule of reason. In Richelieu’s world, kings and ministers are rational instruments of the practical implementation of God’s will on earth.

John Selden

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason P. Rosenblatt
Keyword(s):  
Charles I ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Table Talk ◽  
John Selden ◽  
Rabbinic Law ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Westminster Assembly

The life of John Selden (1584–1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England’s most learned person, he continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to the abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures—Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century’s greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton’s treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius’ view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (“The Law of Nature and of Nations”) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them: his belief in classic rabbinic law (halakha) as authoritative testimony. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly’s scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

Circles of Confidence in Correspondence

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles van den Heuvel ◽  
Scott B. Weingart ◽  
Nils Spelt ◽  
Henk Nellen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Technological Knowledge ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Republic

Science in the early modern world depended on openness in scholarly communication. On the other hand, a web of commercial, political, and religious conflicts required broad measures of secrecy and confidentiality; similar measures were integral to scholarly rivalries and plagiarism. This paper analyzes confidentiality and secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchange via letters and drawings. We argue that existing approaches to understanding knowledge exchange in early modern Europe – which focus on the Republic of Letters as a unified entity of corresponding scholars – can be improved upon by analyzing multilayered networks of communication. We describe a data model to analyze circles of confidence and cultures of secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchanges. Finally, we discuss the outcomes of a first experiment focusing on the question of how personal and professional/official relationships interact with confidentiality and secrecy, based on a case study of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius.

Early Modern Sovereignty and Its Limits

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Straumann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Legal Obligations ◽  
Perfect Duties ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Important Idea

AbstractMy Article seeks to explore a few antecedents of the idea that sovereignty may be encumbered with some obligations and duties vis-à-vis non-sovereigns and even strangers. Theories about limitations on sovereignty and obligations on the part of sovereigns often arose out of the fertile conceptual ground of Roman private law, in particular rules of property law governing usufruct and rules of contract law, such as those governing mandate. Early modern thinkers, especially Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), built on these ideas and, in addition, developed an account of moral and legal obligations arising, independently of God’s will, from a universal human nature. Building on Cicero, Grotius was among the first early-modern thinkers to elaborate the distinction between “perfect” duties of justice and “imperfect” duties of beneficence, an important idea that had wide influence through the work of Emer de Vattel (1714-1767). The Article closes by offering a few observations on the trajectories within which Professor Benvenisti’s concept of “sovereigns as trustees of humanity” could be situated.

Sources in the Modern Tradition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Lesaffer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
State Practice ◽  
The Law

This chapter considers how the modern historiography of international law has ascribed pride of place to the jurisprudence of the law of nature and nations of the Early Modern Age. Whereas the writers from this period have had a significant influence on nineteenth-century international law, their utility as a historical source has been far overrated. The development of the law of nations in that period was much more informed by State practice than historians have commonly credited. Moreover, historiography has overestimated the novelty of the contribution of Early Modern jurisprudence and has almost cast its major historical source of inspiration into oblivion: the late medieval jurisprudence of canon and Roman law. It is thus important to restore medieval jurisprudence to its rightful place in the grand narrative of the evolution of international law.

What is, for Kant, a Law of Nature?

Kant-Studien ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 105 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
Concept Of Law

Abstract:In this paper I explore Kant’s understanding of a law of nature. I begin by reviewing Kant’s explicit statements about what a law is in general before describing an important challenge to the very idea of a law of nature that emerges from the conjunction of the natural law tradition and laws of nature in the early modern period. I then articulate how Kant can respond to that challenge by noting how he can draw on a univocal concept of law involving necessity and legislation in articulating his accounts of laws of nature and the moral law. In this way, we not only come to a better appreciation of Kant’s views on the laws of nature, but also see more clearly some significant structural similarities between his theoretical and practical philosophies as a whole.

Is Modern Liberty Ancient? Roman Remedies and Natural Rights in Hugo Grotius's Early Works on Natural Law

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Straumann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Law And Ethics ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) is widely acknowledged to have made important contributions to an influential doctrine of individual natural rights. In this article I argue that Grotius developed his rights doctrine primarily out of normative Roman sources, that is to say Roman law and ethics. If this Roman tradition has been as central to Grotius's influential writing on natural rights as I claim, why has it not received more scholarly attention? The reasons lie in the view that while rights are constitutive of modern liberty, they were unknown in classical antiquity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document