Historical Development of Natural Law

Emerged in Ancient Greek philosophy, in which the school of the Wise Men distinguished between "nature" and "law" as wise and eternal, and "law" as arbitrary and merely expedient. Law is arbitrary and based only on expediency.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on the other hand, asserted that it was possible to discover eternal and unchanging standards against which to evaluate the merits of written law. Of these, Aristotle believed that there was a natural law or justice that had the same authority wherever it was found and could be discovered through reason. The Stoics introduced a new view and envisioned an equal natural law, believing that reason was possessed by man and that the state of nature was a state of harmony controlled by reason but destroyed by selfishness, and that the state of nature should be restored, and that to live in accordance with reason was to live in accordance with nature. The idea of natural law in Roman law is derived from this.

The scholars of medieval ecclesiastical law were accustomed to making natural law consistent with God's law, although some scholars emphasized God's reason in natural law, while others emphasized God's will.

After the Enlightenment, the theory of natural law finally became an independent rationalist system of thought. By independent, I mean independent of the church and theology. The Dutch jurist Grotius believed that the universe was ruled by rational natural law, and that natural man consisted of norms that necessarily and inevitably arose from man's basic nature. The English Hobbes formulated the social contract hypothesis, which argued that the social contract was a contract to get out of the selfish and cruel state of nature and to give rulers the right to govern, but that the rulers had to abide by natural law.

Historical Influence

The natural law school is the dominant school of jurisprudence in the world today. It is represented by figures such as Grotius, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Pons, Jefferson, and others. The natural law school attaches particular importance to the objective basis of the existence of the law and the value of the goal, that is, human nature, rationality, justice, freedom, equality and order, and attaches importance to the exploration of the ultimate value of the law and the objective basis.