The natural law school

1. Meaning

Natural law has meant different things at different times: the law of God, the law of reason, the law of human nature, or the ideal towards which positive law should strive. What the versions share is the idea that law and morality are connected, and that a rule enacted by the State is not beyond criticism merely because it was properly enacted. It is the opposite of legal positivism, which separates law as it is from law as it ought to be.

2. The ancient period

• Greek thought. Heraclitus saw a rational order (logos) in nature. Socrates distinguished natural justice from conventional justice. Sophocles’ Antigone is the classic illustration: Antigone buries her brother against the king’s decree, appealing to unwritten and unchanging laws of the gods. Aristotle divided justice into natural justice, which has the same force everywhere, and conventional justice, which depends on enactment.
• The Stoics said the universe is governed by reason and that men, being rational, can discover and live by its law.
• Rome. Cicero wrote that true law is right reason in agreement with nature, of universal application, unchanging and everlasting, and that a law contrary to it is not law at all. The Roman jurists used natural law to develop the jus gentium, the law common to all peoples, which they applied to foreigners and which softened the rigid jus civile.

3. The medieval period

The Church made natural law a part of theology. St. Thomas Aquinas gave the fullest account. He distinguished four kinds of law: eternal law (the reason of God governing the universe), natural law (the part of eternal law that man can know through reason), divine law (revealed through scripture) and human law (made by men for the common good). Human law derives its authority from natural law; a human law in conflict with it is a perversion of law. Aquinas did not, however, license general disobedience; an unjust law might still be obeyed to avoid scandal or disorder.

4. The Renaissance and the social contract

From the sixteenth century natural law was separated from theology and grounded in reason alone, and it became the basis of theories of the State.

• Grotius (1583–1645), the father of international law, said natural law would hold even if God did not exist, because it follows from the social nature of man. He used it to build rules for relations between States.
• Hobbes described the state of nature as a war of all against all, in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” To escape it men surrendered all their rights to a sovereign by a social contract. The sovereign’s power is absolute. Natural law here supports authority.
• Locke saw the state of nature as one of peace and reason, short only of a common judge. Men gave up only the right to enforce the law of nature, keeping their natural rights to life, liberty and property. A government that violates them may be resisted. Locke supplied the theory behind the American Declaration of Independence and later bills of rights.
• Rousseau placed sovereignty in the general will of the people. His ideas of liberty and equality fed the French Revolution.

5. Decline in the nineteenth century

Natural law lost ground for three reasons. Hume showed that an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is”, so that moral rules cannot be read off nature. The analytical positivists (Bentham, Austin) insisted that law is the command of a sovereign, and called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts” (Bentham). The historical school (Savigny) traced law to the spirit of each people, denying that any law was universal. Codification in Europe also gave judges written rules in place of appeals to reason.

6. Revival in the twentieth century

• Stammler: natural law with a variable content. The form of just law is constant but its content changes with time and place.
• Lon Fuller: the inner morality of law. A legal system must satisfy eight procedural requirements (generality, promulgation, non-retroactivity, clarity, consistency, possibility of compliance, constancy, and congruence between rules and official action). A system that fails them badly is not law at all.
• John Finnis: basic goods (life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, religion) and requirements of practical reason.
• After 1945: the Nazi experience led to the Nuremberg trials, where obedience to the law of the State was rejected as a defence, and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, a statement in natural-law terms of rights that belong to every person. The Hart–Fuller debate was fought over this ground.

7. Natural law in Indian law

The Constitution contains no clause on natural law, but the courts use the idea. The principles of natural justice (audi alteram partem, no man a judge in his own cause) are applied to every quasi-judicial and administrative decision without any statute requiring them. In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, 1978 INSC 16, (1978) 1 SCC 248, the Court held that the procedure established by law under Article 21 must be fair, just and reasonable, and read the requirement of a hearing into the Passports Act. In Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, 1973 INSC 91, (1973) 4 SCC 225, the Court declined to rest its decision on natural rights, but the basic structure doctrine it laid down places limits on even a constitutional amendment, which is the structure of the natural-law argument.

8. Attractions and criticisms

Attractions.

• It supplies a standard by which bad laws can be criticised and reformed.
• It protects the individual against the State; the modern law of human rights grew from it.
• It fills gaps: judges have used equity, good conscience and natural justice where statute is silent.
• It gave international law its foundation (Grotius).
• It keeps law tied to justice, which is what most people expect law to deliver.

Criticisms.

• Its content is uncertain: Hobbes used it to justify absolute power and Locke to justify revolution.
• It confuses law as it is with law as it ought to be (Austin, Hart).
• It treats as universal what is the morality of one place and time.
• An appeal to a higher law can be used to excuse disobedience of any law a person dislikes.

How this is examined

As a 16-mark essay: “Discuss the natural law theory and state its attractions” (January 2026, Q.2). Older papers ask for “the revival of natural law” or a comparison with positivism. Write the five periods with one or two names each, then a paragraph on India (natural justice, Maneka Gandhi, basic structure), then attractions and criticisms as two lists. A natural law answer with no Indian material loses easy marks.