National University of study and

research in law, Ranchi

JURISPRUDENCE

MID-TERM PROJECT SYNOPSIS

CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT TEST - II

A CRITICISM OF NATURAL LAW THEORY

Submitted By: Submitted To:

Name – Dewashish Name – Nimesh Das Guru

Roll No – 320, Sec – B (Assistant Prof.), NUSRL

Semester – VIII Jurisprudence Faculty

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ABSTRACT

Law is, generally, a system of rules which are enforced through social institutions to govern
behavior, although the term "law" has no universally accepted definition. Laws can be made by
legislatures through legislation, the executive through decrees and regulations, or judges through
binding precedents. Private individuals can create legally binding contracts, including arbitration
agreements that exclude the normal court process. The formation of laws themselves may be
influenced by a constitution and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics,
and society in various ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people.1

The term "natural law" is ambiguous. It refers to a type of moral theory, as well as to a type of
legal theory, but the core claims of the two kinds of theory are logically independent. It does not
refer to the laws of nature, the laws that science aims to describe. According to natural law moral
theory, the moral standards that govern human behavior are, in some sense, objectively derived
from the nature of human beings and the nature of the world. While being logically independent
of natural law legal theory, the two theories intersect. However, the majority of the article will
focus on natural law legal theory. According to natural law legal theory, the authority of legal
standards necessarily derives, at least in part, from considerations having to do with the moral
merit of those standards.

Classical natural law theory such as the theory of Thomas Aquinas focuses on the overlap between
natural law moral and legal theories. Similarly, the neo-naturalism of John Finnis is a development
of classical natural law theory. In contrast, the procedural naturalism of Lon L. Fuller is a rejection
of the conceptual naturalist idea that there are necessary substantive moral constraints on the
content of law. Lastly, Ronald Dworkin’s theory is a response and critique of legal positivism. All
of these theories subscribe to one or more basic tenets of natural law legal theory and are important
to its development and influence.2

According to natural law theory of law, there is no clean division between the notion of law and
the notion of morality. Though there are different versions of natural law theory, all subscribe to

1
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09076a.htm
2
http://www.iep.utm.edu/natlaw/

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the thesis that there are at least some laws that depend for their "authority" not on some pre-existing
human convention, but on the logical relationship in which they stand to moral standards. The idea
that the concepts of law and morality intersect in some way is called the Overlap Thesis.

Finnis believed that, the classical naturalists were not concerned with giving a conceptual account
of legal validity; rather they were concerned with explaining the moral force of law.

Lon Fuller (1964) rejects the conceptual naturalist idea that there are necessary substantive moral
constraints on the content of law. On Fuller's view, human activity is necessarily goal-oriented or
purposive in the sense that people engage in a particular activity because it helps them to achieve
some end.

On Hart's view, all actions, including virtuous acts like lawmaking and impermissible acts like
poisoning, have their own internal standards of efficacy. But insofar as such standards of efficacy
conflict with morality, as they do in the case of poisoning, it follows that they are distinct from
moral standards. Thus, while Hart concedes that something like Fuller's eight principles are built
into the existence conditions for law, he concludes they do not constitute a conceptual connection
between law and morality.

Dworkin rejects positivism's Social Fact Thesis on the ground that there are some legal standards
the authority of which cannot be explained in terms of social facts. On Dworkin's view,
the Riggs court was not just reaching beyond the law to extralegal standards when it considered
this principle. For the Riggs judges would "rightfully" have been criticized had they failed to
consider this principle; if it were merely an extralegal standard, there would be no rightful grounds
to criticize a failure to consider it (Dworkin 1977, 35). Accordingly, Dworkin concludes that the
best explanation for the propriety of such criticism is that principles are part of the law.

The researcher on the basis of the above data will delve into the various types of natural law
theories, divergent views, criticism and analysis of the various views taken by various philosophers
and jurists to find out the jurisprudence of the natural law theory.