From The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 40 (1995), 157-98. This entry contains an introductory essay followed by a lengthy bibliography of natural law essays written mostly in English during the past fifty or so years. It is not complete but it contains most of the major entries.
James V. Schall, S. J.
SUNDRY REFLECTIONS "THE NATURAL LAW BIBLIOGRAPHY"
"The story of the life and murder and resurrection of God-in-Man is not only the symbol and epitome of the relations of God and man throughout time; it is also a series of events that took place at a particular point in time. And the people of that time had not the faintest idea that it was happening.
Of all examples of the classical tragic irony in fact or fiction, this is the greatest -- the classic of classics. Beside it, the doom of Oedipus is trifling, and the nemesis of the Oresteian blood-bath a mere domestic incident. For the Christian affirmation is that a number of quite commonplace human beings, in an obscure province of the Roman Empire, killed and murdered God Almighty -- quite casually, almost as a matter of religious and political routine, and certainly with no notion that they were doing anything out of the way."
-- Dorothy Sayers, "Introduction," The Man Born To Be King, 1943.1
To introduce what is in effect an extended reading list on natural law by citing something from the famous British mystery-story writer and philosopher Dorothy Sayers will, of course, seem distinctly odd. So be it. During World War II, Dorothy Sayers wrote or rather refashioned the four Gospels into a radio drama for the BBC. Sayers is famous for her translation of Dante and for her philosophic analyses of the nature of drama herself, as well as for her book, The Mind of the Maker, itself a pretty good book to read for anyone interested in natural law.2 What most struck Miss Sayers about this endeavor of presenting the Gospels as a radio drama was how remarkably close the Gospel accounts corresponded to sound dramatic theory. She further pressed the meaning of this coincidence in her many and useful explanatory asides when she commented on the characters and movement of the drama. She discovered that ordinary people can do terrible things, in part knowingly, in part unknowingly. The very recounting of this drama in "an obscure province of the Roman Empire" makes us aware of an overriding law or principle that stands in judgment of human actions and sheds light on what they might mean, on why they might please or might shock us. The drama of the death of Christ, whether by radio on the BBC or in any other media, including the reading of the Gospels themselves, is meaningless if there is no abiding law or principle against which it stands and demands explication.
Every so often, I do a semester course on "Political Philosophy and Natural Law." Many students, especially those who anticipate being lawyers, as it seems almost all students today do so anticipate, suspect somehow, though they are not quite sure why, that they should know something about natural law. It has a kind of nice ring to it. Somehow it must be dealt with, even to reject it. Many students have still heard of the Nuremberg Trials and how natural law was a kind of last resort to judge some of the worst scoundrels of our era. Most students are likewise vaguely aware that it is quite unlikely that a course in natural law as such will be offered in any law school of their otherwise free choice. For the most part, a serious study of the natural law and its tradition must be something in the nature of a private enterprise. Many students are aware that what they are likely to be given to study in the universities on this subject is wholly inadequate to meet or to understand the great philosophical tradition of the West, and of Christian thought in particular. This is the tradition in which natural law thinking was founded and has always remained an unsettling but noble presence.
A law student recently told me that she tried to find a course on the relation of Christianity and law, but the school she was attending did not offer one. It did have a course in the "Jewish Sources of Law," however. I suspect "Islamic Sources", "Buddhist Sources", via multi-culturalism, are on the horizon. The law school in question that did not have a course in Christian sources of law was, amusingly, at a Catholic University. Fortunately, a suitable course was found in a near-by law school. The best I can do for such students is to suggest initially a reading of Harold Berman's eye-opening Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. I also think my old mentor Heinrich Rommen's book, The Natural Law, is also worth a look. In the beginning it is crucial for students to have at least some beginning sense of the need intellectually to get outside the almost total dominance of legal positivism. Probably the most common way students will acquire this perspective is through Strauss or Voegelin or Maritain. Another way to accomplish this independence of rigid academic control is to read Plato in a serious and careful manner. John Wild's Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law is still quite worth reading.3
No doubt, in recent years, the best and most paradoxical thing to happen to natural law in the public forum was the Thomas Hearings. When Senator Joseph Biden, a Catholic, said, in connection with Judge Thomas's writings on natural law, that this same natural law was a dangerous doctrine, he made many wonder just why is there such opposition to it from such sources. The senator, who seemed rather innocent of the Catholic tradition on the topic, feared that the Constitution itself and all legislation under it might thereby be subject to a judgment that was not simply identical with the will of the Court, the legislature, or the people. Biden, be it noted, was on the side of the Court, the legislature, and the people as these entities have come to be defined in modern thought with no grounding or basis in principle or abiding reason that might explain how they could in fact go wrong, individually or collectively. The natural law tradition was precisely one that argued for the reasonable limits of political power from whatever source.
As if to confirm the perceived dangers of natural law in the eyes of many professional opponents to religion, who often think that a thing is wrong on no other grounds than that a religious authority thinks it right, the Holy Father devoted a large section of Veritatis Splendor to its elaboration, clarification, and representation. This presentation of the understanding of natural law is one of the clearest and most brilliant in its long literature. From now on, it must be included in every discussion of the topic. John Paul II argued that there were absolute truths and things that were intrinsically evil, no matter who did them. Any society based on pure political will that chooses in its constitution or legislation principles or fosters practices contrary to the natural law, the Holy Father suspected, will find itself in the deepest of moral and political trouble, even when it calls its resulting troubles by any other name but the truth of what they are. To name the truth of regimes and to acknowledge the real nature of our souls remain moral and political projects of the greatest difficulty when done honestly on the basis of laws we do not make for ourselves, on the basis of natural laws, that is..
Cicero's famous and ringing statement of the natural law somehow still sounds uncannily like John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, almost as if there is in fact an abiding tradition and teaching, whether propounded by the ancients' most eloquent lawyer or by a brilliant modern Pope-philosopher. Cicero's classic words remain moving, even to those do not realize that they, in their own lives and principles, really do not follow any of its basic norms:
True law is Reason, right and natural, commanding people to fulfill their obligations and prohibiting and deterring them from doing wrong. Its validity is universal; it is immutable and eternal. Its commands and prohibitions apply effectively to good men, and those uninfluenced by them are bad. Any attempt to suppress this law, to repeal any part of it, is sinful; to cancel it entirely is impossible. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly can exempt us from its demands; we need no interpreter or expounder of it but ourselves. There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now and one later, but all nations will be subject all the time to this one changeless and everlasting law (De Rei Publica, III, 33).
This passage retains its power and depth in our era just as it has claimed the attention of earlier times.
Usually, when we are studying in class Cicero and come to this passage, I have a couple of different students in turn stand and read aloud this text to the rest of the class. I ask the class just to listen. I ask the student to read very loudly and very slowly. I have observed the listening students are usually very silent. I want to be sure that once in their lives they hear Cicero, just hear him. It should be read in Latin also, and there is no reason it cannot be, after a couple of initial readings in English. I know we need, in addition, the philosophic background of Plato and Aristotle, and so many others, properly to ground this topic's place in thought. In our multi-cultural times, Cicero still explains its dangers, the dangers of having one law in Rome and another in Athens, of one now and another later, of having nothing to judge the nations except what they decide for themselves, according to nothing but their own wills. It is but a short step, I suspect, from denying the abiding validity of Cicero to the "war of all against all," another kind of natural law, to be sure.
As I began to collect this bibliography over the years, I had the intention of compiling a book of natural law readings, sort of a more complete and up-to-date version of Brendan F. Brown's still useful The Natural Law Reader. First of all, for any one who wants to read in this most fascinating area, it is difficult to gather in one place the substantial essays on natural law that have been written in the last half-century. For all the supposed death of natural law, furthermore, a look at this literature assures us that the topic is quite alive. Indeed natural law has suddenly gained a vigor and vitality that we might not have anticipated. But then I realized that the amount of good natural law reading in the periodical literature is really too much for one book or a number of books of hefty size. I did not want to abbreviate or select central passages after the model of the Brown book, though I can see now why that was almost his only alternative. What I have in mind about this Natural Law Bibliography was to provide a useful resource for those law school professors, for those curious legal students, for the active lawyer or judge, for those philosopher, theologian, political theorist, politician, economist, or journalist who recall or come to understand the vital meaning of this too much neglected, but amazingly fascinating topic.
Moreover, I was pleased to see that Charles Rice has published another kind of book on natural law that has long been needed, his Fifty Questions on the Natural Law: What It Is and Why We Need It. I will not accuse him of imitating either the Baltimore Catechism or the new General Catechism of the Catholic Church but that question and answer format allows a more systematic and articulated approach. Actually, The General Catechism is also something that should be read by anyone interested in the background to studies on natural law as the Catechism clarifies just what belongs to revelation and what is reason's relation to it in the mind of the Catholic Church.
Surely, fifty years ago, Jacques Maritain was most responsible for attention to the natural law in intellectual and political circles. Without doubt, recently the central book in this revised attention to natural law is John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights. It is difficult to overestimate its influence and importance, and, yes, brilliance. When this book first appeared, however, one would hardly have expected the lively turn of controversy this study has caused. We would have expected that the main critics of the book came from opponents to any theory of natural law. Instead, the book has found its most articulate criticism from natural law thinkers within the general Thomist tradition. Both Henry Veatch's Natural Rights: Fact or Fancy and Russell Hittinger's A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory have provided, in analyzing the Finnis thesis, an examination of the whole natural law tradition and its relation to modernity. It is within this background that the Finnis book is seen to be more on the side of modernity than on that of St. Thomas. This controversy is ongoing and the literature is full of various analyses of this lively and, I must say, welcome analysis at its more profound levels.
The older (1930's-60's) natural law theorists -- Rommen, Maritain, Burke, Lottin, d'Entreves, Simon, Messner -- left a legacy that is still of the first rank and on which these more recent studies have built. But into this thinking from those with Catholic backgrounds, we must acknowledge the imposing presence of Leo Strauss' famous essay on "The Natural Law" as well as his pioneering Natural Right and History. It is Strauss, I think, who, more than anyone else, has alerted us to the very different ideas of natural right and natural law, though d'Entreves quite clearly anticipated this issue in his little book on The Natural Law. Strauss distinguished classic natural right, natural law, and modern natural right. He found modern natural right to be quite radically different from natural law or classic natural right. He held modern natural right to be at the origin of most modern moral and political disorders. Not to be aware of the difference between natural law, classic and modern natural right was a major and oft-recurring confusion.
The attempt uncritically to fuse natural law with this modern natural right theory, something that too many modern religious thinkers have tried to do under the aegis of "human rights", has, in addition, caused a serious intellectual and religious confusion and political peril. Indeed, discussion of natural or human "rights", as Maurice Cranston and Mary Ann Glendon have chronicled, has become all to uncritical so that these supposedly common notions are most dangerously used without some explicit awareness that natural or human rights can mean the very opposite of that grounded philosophical tradition that derived from human nature. Even the Pope sometimes embraces the cause of "human rights" in a way that causes him trouble when suddenly abortion or homosexuality are propounded as modern "human rights" to be promoted and protected by the state as perfectly "normal".4
Heinrich Rommen, moreover, takes us back to the Seventeenth Century Suarezian tradition of natural law, a tradition that is not yet sufficiently studied with regard to the split between modern and classic natural right. Suarez has been said to have exercised the influence in Spanish speaking countries that Locke did in English speaking countries, and in the same direction. In the discussion of the origin of modern natural right, I have always considered Father Charles N. R. McCoy's discussion of Grotius' famous phrase that the natural law would be the natural law even on the supposition that God did not exist, to be crucial. If God did not exist, there would be no natural law of any sort, but as McCoy shows, with great acumen, this is a philosophical not theological statement.
Maritain and Simon have made St. Thomas available to many. Both are aware of the problems with natural or human rights and have sought to counter the dangers. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas himself is still in many ways the leading figure in natural law thinking. No study on natural law can or should avoid paying fundamental attention to Aquinas' arguments on this topic. The Straussian school has not found a natural law tradition in either Plato, Aristotle, or Sophocles. This unexpected resistance to natural law in the name of classic natural right is due in part to the relation of reason and Christian revelation in particular, a relationship that is directly related to any natural law tradition. Natural law is thus in Strauss looked upon as a product primarily of revelation. St. Paul's claim that there is such a thing as natural reasoning or law only seems to confirm this thesis. Ralph McInerny's work, I think, goes a long way to meet these problems.
The crucial question with modern, as opposed to classic, natural right is whether the former right represents a complete break with the principled classical tradition? If so, and Strauss thinks that it does, there is no real limit or norm capable of establishing anything that might be called naturally right. With no natural law, "whatever the prince wills, is the law", to recall Aquinas' third objection to the question of the basis of law in reason (I-II, 90, 1, Obj. 3). On the other hand, Strauss does not allow that classic natural right might have some philosophic origin in a lawgiver, a transcendent lawgiver. Natural right, he argues, cannot be called "law" properly speaking. I think it is possible to address Strauss' concerns. Indeed, this reflection on Strauss' view of natural right and law is one of the most stimulating and important strands of thought in recent natural law literature and is not to be missed.
One of the central problems that critics of Finnis and Grisez have found with their new version of natural law lies in its relation to Kant. It is wondered whether there is any adequate grounding of natural law in metaphysics and not just logic or consciousness. I have always found Hadley Arkes' most stimulating and perceptive book, First Things, to be the best effort I know to bridge the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions. Veatch and Hittinger have argued that there is a quasi-Kantian presence in the Finnis-Grisez position that is worrisome. The periodical literature on this controversy constitutes, along with the Straussian concerns, a major stimulus to natural law theory. Another writer who is no doubt important to this whole issue is Alasdair MacIntyre whose general works on ethics and philosophy have had great impact.
Charles N. R. McCoy was aware of the problem of the jus gentium and the relation of this concept to international law or the law of nations. A writer who is too little known in this area is E. B. F. Midgley at the University of Aberdeen. His book The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations is a gold mine of careful study. Further, as David Yost at the Naval Post-Graduate School has taught me, international relations are in fact a fruitful addition to the early modern notion of the law of nations, especially as seen in the pioneering work of Martin Wight.5
The American Founding has also been a source of thinking in the literature about natural law. The Declaration of Independence makes this relationship to natural law and natural right inevitable. The question is asked about whether the American Founding was strictly a modern founding? That is, was America founded in modern and therefore ungrounded natural rights, or was it ultimately traced back through Vittoria, Suarez, and Grotius, to the scholastics through them to the Roman and Greek traditions? I have found the work of my colleague George Carey to be most perceptive in this area.6 I think the two books most useful to make the argument that there was a consistent natural law and religious background to the American founding are Hadley Arkes' Beyond the Constitution and Ellis Sandoz' A Government of Law. The controversies on this score about the Founding between Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, Robert Bork, Richard Stevens, and a host of others, including those who look on the cause of the South with a more sympathetic eye, are well worth studying. They do ultimately have much to do with the validity and invalidity of natural law theory as it works its way out in historical practice.
A fertile approach to natural law, taken in a rather broad sense, concerns Leon Kass' two books, Toward a More Natural Science and The Hungry Soul. Kass takes a medically informed look at the actual operations of human life and the way it is informed by soul and how intimately the body is related to it. Kass' books, I think, are pioneering and will almost do more than any others to prepare us to look at what we might mean by a natural functioning that informs our lives. Maritain's famous definition of a natural law in his Man and the State, as "the normalcy of functioning", finds much detailed support in Kass' works. They are must reading, I think.
I have also found the work of Father Stanley L. Jaki to be pertinent to the field of natural law in more than a tangential way. Jaki's studies in the history of science are especially valuable. I well recall reading his The Road of Science and the Ways to God and being struck by his discussion of the philosophical and theological origins of science -- why did it begin? where? why not elsewhere? on what principles?7 Jaki's argument is that science depends on a proper understanding of the relation of God and the world. A god who is purely arbitrary can have no "law". A god who is everything -- pantheism -- cannot be a god in which science can flourish. What is needed is a god who is not the world and a world that is not itself absolute. What is to be argued is a world that reveals a secondary but stable order, a contingent regularity, in other words, a law. For those interested in the science side of natural law, Jaki's works are indispensable. Likewise, I have always found J. M. Bochenski's little chapter on "Law" in his very useful book Philosophy -- an Introduction, to be the best statement of the sort of thing Jaki was trying to establish.
Moreover, as is becoming more clear every day, the main issue that natural law theory will have to face immediately is that having to do with ecology or environment. Probably in no area is there more confusion or a more aggressive attack on the priorities of natural law. Paul Johnson has noted that much totalitarian theory has reappeared in the ecology or environmental movements, among other places.8 I have included Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource, both because of its pioneering work in the field of the relation of human population to human resources, but also because it restores the balance in thinking of the priority of man and nature.9 One of the remarkable features of the ecology movement has been the ease with which classic natural law positions have, presumably, had to yield to the very dubious terms of this new ideology. The extraordinary attention to animal, vegetation, and even rock rights reveals the degree to which this area has come to dominate discussions of human rights. Man is more and more reduced to a function of nature, not its purpose and crown.
A crucial aspect of natural law is precisely its relation to revelation. Strauss in a famous passage did not want to consider St. Thomas' natural law as really philosophical because it is said to arise in revelation. This relationship of reason to divine and natural law is a basic philosophic issue and it quite well represented in the literature. Related to this side of the question is the extent to which we find natural law in the Protestant tradition. It is there, though in a more attenuated and nuanced fashion. No doubt it must be said, however, that one of the very best books ever written on natural law was C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. For the most part, even though natural law is older than Christianity, natural law is looked upon as a particularly Catholic preserve. This exclusivity is perhaps ironic since one of the main reasons Catholics are interested in natural law is because it is a non-religious link to non-Catholics, non-Christians, and non-theists. The Catholic tradition has taken great pains to argue on what it calls a natural law basis precisely to grant reason its objective due. Indeed, the validity of reason and its proper grounding is essential for revelation.10 What is perhaps perplexing about the historic interest in the natural law philosophic tradition as not having per se a religious origin is the abandonment of reason itself in some sections of modernity and what is now called post-modernity. In one sense, this turn of philosophic events has left reason more and more to the theists, perhaps even to the Catholic theists, an ironic result that is well worth pondering.
Issues of abortion, population, contraception, euthanasia, genetic engineering, gender confusion and manipulation, and in general human life, in its coming and going, are areas in which we find considerable natural law thinking and writing. The famous opposition to Paul VI's Encyclical Humanae Vitae launched a concerted attack on the version of natural law that was said to support this position. The most important and insightful book in this field is probably Janet Smith's 'Humanae Vitae': A Generation Later. What is being reluctantly admitted is that there does seem to be a certain kind of logic at work in the moral order when the naturalness of the law of life is denied. Paul VI almost seems a prophet if we look at the results in the public order of denying the intrinsic relation of love, marriage, and life. We no longer deal with questions of contraception so much as homosexuality, fetal experimentation, surrogate birthings, and a host of other practices which even though legislated as legal still appear in some objective fashion as precisely "unnatural".
A final area that needs elaboration is the relation of metaphysics and natural law. Raymond Dennehy's essay "The Ontological Basis of Human Rights" remains an excellent study of this topic. With the recent publication (Peter Lang, 1993) of Karol Wojtyla's philosophical essays from the 1950's to 70's we can likewise see that he was very perceptive about the relation between metaphysics and ethics. One of the curious thing that has happened in many academic philosophical departments, especially those in Catholic universities, is the almost total take over of the philosophical discipline by ethics and ethical questions -- not that interest in human living, as the Holy Father pointed out in one of his essays, is not itself normal and to be expected. This relative neglect of other areas related to ethics has always struck me as a fatal mistake. The intimate relation between ethics and metaphysics in Wojtyla's essays strikes a balance and depth that is rarely seen in these areas. The writings of Josef Cardinal Ratzinger are also very illuminating to natural law studies. His Inaugural Lecture to the French Academy (November 6, 1992) is well worth reading in this regard. Natural law studies, in any case, are directly related to the prior topics of ethics and metaphysics.
Looking over this bibliography of natural law writings, clearly, a number of other themes that I have not touched on recur. What I think is important is for the reader interested in natural law is some immediate awareness of the amount of very first-rate thinking that has been going on in this area. It is not always in agreement, of course, and there are some times heated disputes in the field. All this proves a thesis of mine in another context which argues that just because something is neglected in dominant institutions and media, there still can be quietly something else of great depth going on. Some few who remain independent enough and enterprising enough continue what has in fact been a perennial concern of the human mind.11
I think that the two journals, The American Journal of Jurisprudence and Virginia Black's Vera Lex, have been especially important, though natural law thinking is respected in and appears with some regularity in a number of other journals, The Review of Politics and The Thomist, to mention only two. The Indices of all these journals contain much that is central to any complete consideration of natural law. When we realize the reality of correct political thinking in academia, we can hardly overestimate the value of small journals and organization who manage independently of the fads and exclusive controls of the mainline journals and organizations to keep attention focused on what are the real problems of mankind. They contribute to a development of that central line of thought about natural law that has so enhanced human worth. New journals come into existence and old and worthy ones -- I think of Thought -- sometimes die. No doubt we need to produce a Compact Disk, on which we can find all the writings on natural law, with index. It would probably take a couple of disks. We need a natural law discussion group -- there may even be one -- we can use on our computers. But these will come before we know it.
Natural law, of course, is not merely a scholarly enterprise. Indeed, if that is all it were, it would be of only passing interest. Rather, as Veritatis Splendor suggests, natural law refers to a way of life, to a quest for right living. Moreover, it claims to know in what right living consists. Natural law in a sense is a kind of moral and intellectual but private declaration of independence. We can hardly repeat today those famous words that refer to self-evident truths, to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," without pangs of conscience, as it is so evident that we have as a people distanced ourselves from this declared foundation. This awareness makes it more clear that the quiet, out-of-the-way effort to keep this tradition alive not merely as something to be studied but as something to be lived is one of the great tasks of civilization, of knowing what it is, of preserving it, of furthering it.
There should be no doubt then that natural law and civilization are intimately related. To the degree that they are not, right order of soul as well as of the city collapse. When the collapse does occur, we can only begin to think about the disorder and wonder how it occurred. When we do consider what we have brought into existence, we will find that the definitions of our disorders constitute, as in a convex mirror, the outlines of the true natural law, of how life ought to be lived without the moral and civilizational disorder that are spread before us. We ironically claim to be "autonomous". We claim to be governed by no natural law. We claim this because we think that the only thing we can know is ourselves and of ourselves, only what we will, presupposed to nothing but ourselves. C. S. Lewis rightly called this consequence "the abolition of man".
This natural law bibliography, I think, in conclusion, is still a flickering sign that the outlines of civilization, even, if you will, of the City of God, are being preserved and even fostered, at least in some modern obscure and outlying outposts of the inheritors of the old Roman Empire. We are aware that by any classic natural right or natural law understanding we witness terrible events in our times. We also know that many people also of our time "have not the faintest awareness of what is happening." This natural law bibliography, perhaps, is an indication that at least some few are aware of the paradoxes and, though worried, they are still hopeful about reason, revelation, and, yes, natural law.
______________
NATURAL LAW BIBLIOGRAPHY
(The following is an extensive but still partial listing of books and essays on the natural law written in the past fifty years. Most of these are in English or are English translations. There are some French, German, Italian, and Spanish materials. Each of these languages will have numerous books and essays on the topic).
Books:
Aartsen, Jan, and Leo J. Elder, "Lex" and "Libertas": Freedom and Law according to St. Thomas Aquinas (Vatican City: Editrice Vaticana, 1987).
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, Edited with an Introduction by A. P. d'Entreves (Totowa, N. J.: Barnes & Noble, 1981).
________, On Politics and Ethics, Translated and Edited by Paul E. Sigmund (New York: Norton, 1988).
________, Saint Thomas Aquinas: On Law, Morality, and Politics, Edited by William P. Baumbarth and Richard J. Regan, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988).
________, St. Thomas Aquinas: On Politics and Ethics, Edited and Translated by Paul E. Sigmund (New York: Norton, 1988).
Arkes, Hadley, Beyond the Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
________, First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Battaglia, Anthony, Towards a Reformulation of Natural Law (New York: Seabury, 1981).
Begin, R. F., Natural Law and Positive Law (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1959.
Berman, Herald J., Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)
Bloch, Ernest, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Translated by Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
Bloom, Allan, Confronting the Constitution (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1990).
Bocklle, Franz, Das Naturrecht im Disput (Dusseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1966.
Brown, Brendan F., The Natural Law Reader (Docket Series, N. 13; New York, Oceana, 1960).
Brown, Leo C., "Natural Law and Economics," The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 266-68.
Brown, Oscar J., Natural Rectitude and Divine Law in Aquinas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981).
Carlyle, A. J., A History of Medieval Political Theory: From the Roman Lawyers of the Second Century to the Political Writers of the Ninth (Edinburgh, Blackwood, MCMXXX). Vol. I.
________, R. W. and A. J., A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West: The Political Theory of the Roman Lawyers and Canonists, from the Tenth Century to the Thirteenth Century, Vol. II, MCMXXVIII.
Carroll, William A., "The Natural Law in the Incorporation of the First Amendment into the Due Process Clause and Fourteenth Amendment," Doctoral Dissertation, Georgetown University, 1963.
Cogley, John, Editor, Natural Law and Modern Society (Cleveland: World, 1962.
Corwin, Edward S., The "Higher Law" Background of American Constitutional Law (Great Seal Books; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961.
Cranston, Maurice, What Are Human Rights? (New York: Taplinger, 1973).
Crowe, Michael Bertram, The Changing Profile of the Natural Law (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).
Delhaye, Phillippe, Permanence du droit naturel (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1967).
DeLubac, Henri, Nature and Grace (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984).
D'Entreves, A. P, The Natural Law: An Historical Survey (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951).
Ellul, Jacques, The Theological Foundations of Law (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1960).
Evans, Illtud, Light on the Natural Law (Baltimore: Helicon, 1965).
Farrell, Patrick M., Sources of St. Thomas' Concept of Natural Law (Melbourne: [Reprint from The Thomist XX, 1957, 237-94], 1957).
Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York: Oxford, 1980).
Fuchs, Josef, The Natural Law: A Theological Investigation (New York, 1965).
George, Robert P., Natural Law Theories: Contemporary Essays (New York: Oxford, 1992).
Glendon, Mary Ann, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991). [Schall Review, "The Wrong of 'Rights'," in Freedom Review 23 (August, 1992), 50-52).
Grisez, Germain G., Beyond the New Morality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
________, Contraception and the Natural Law (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1964.
________, A Grisez Reader for Beyond the New Morality (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1982.
Hegel, G. W. F., Natural Law, Translated by T. M. Know (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975).
Hervada, Javier, Natural Right and Natural Law: A Critical Introduction (Pamplona, Spain: University of Navarra, 1987).
Hittinger, Russell, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).
Hogue, Arthur R., Origins of the Common Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1985).
Jaffa, Harry V., Original Intentent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question (Washington: Regnery/Gateway, 1994).
Kass, Leon, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
________, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: The Free Press, 1985).
Kelly, David R., The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Kenny, J. F., "Reflections on Human Nature and the Supernatural," Theological Studies, 14 (1952), 280-87.
Kern, F., Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, Translated by S. B. Chrimes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948).
Kleinknecht, Hermann and W.Gutbrod, Law, Bible Key Words from Gerhard Kittel (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1962).
Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947)
________, Mere Christianity (London, Fontana, 1961).
Lippmann, Walter, The Public Philosohy (New York: Mentor, 1944).
Maritain, Jacques, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
________, The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, Translated by Doris C4. Anson (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986).
McCoubrey, H., Development of Naturalistic Legal Theory (New York: Croom Helm, 1987).
McCoy, Charles N. R., The Structure of Political Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963)
Medieval Tradition of Natural Law, Edited by Harold J. Johnson (Toronto: Medieval Institute, 1987.
Messner, Johannes, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Western World, Translated by J. J. Doherty (St. Louis: Herder, 1974).
Midgley, E. B. F., The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Politics (London: Elek, 1975).
Miller, Fred D., Jr, Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See "Aristotle's Politics: A Symposium," The Review of Metaphysics, XLIX (June, 1996), 731-908.
Murray, John Courtney, We Hold These Truths (New York: Doubleday Image, 1956).
Newman, Jeremiah, Conscience vs. Law: Reflections on the Evolution of Natural Law (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971).
Oakley, Francis, Natural Law, Conciliarism, and Consent in the Late Middle Ages (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984.
Pieper, Josef, Living the Truth: The Truth of All Things and Reality and the Good (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989).
Rice, Charles, Fifty Questions on the Natural Law (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).
Rommen, Heinrich A.,The State in Catholic Thought (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1945).
________, The Natural Law, Translated by Thomas R. Hanley (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1947).
Sandoz, Ellis, A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
Sigmund, Paul E., Natural Law in Political Thought (Cambridge: Winthrop, 1971).
________, "Natural Law in Political Thought," The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 268-71.
Simon, Julian L., The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Simon,Yves, The Tradition of Natural Law: A Philosopher's Reflections, Edited by Vukan Kuic (New York: Fordham University Press, 1965, [1993 edition with Introduction by Russell Hittinger]).
Smith, Janet, 'Humanae Vitae': A Generation Later (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991).
Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, MI., 1958.
Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
Thomas Aquinas, On Politics and Ethics, Translated and Edited by Paul E. Sigmund (New York: Norton, 1988).
Tuck, Richard, Natural Rights: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Veatch, Henry, Human Rights: Fact or Fancy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).
________, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.
Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
Wilhelmsen, Frederick D., Christianity and Political Philosophy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
Wild, John, Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
Wojtyla, Karol, Person and Community: Selected Essays, Translated by T. Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). [Reviewed by James V. Schall, in The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 39 (1994), 499-502].
Wu, John C. H., Fountain of Justice (New York: Sheed & Ward,1955.
Selected Essays on Natural Law:
[The following journals will frequently have articles dealing with natural law: The American Journal of Jurisprudence (formerly The Natural Law Forum); Vera Lex (Journal of the Natural Law Society); The Review of Politics; Thought; Modern Schoolman; New Scholasticism, The Thomist, The Catholic Lawyer, Human Rights Quarterly; check also under "Natural Law" in The Social Science Index, The Humanities Index, The British Humanities Index, The Catholic Periodical Index, and The Philosophy Index].
Abraham, M. B., "What Constitutes a Civil Right?" New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1984, 52-54.
Adams, E. M., "The Ground of Human Rights," American Philosophical Quarterly, 19 (April, 1982), 192-96.
Adams, J. L., "The Law of Nature in Graeco-Roman Thought," Journal of Religion, 25 (April, 1945), 97-118.
Alzeghy, Zoltan, "Il concetto di natura en teologia," Civiltà Cattolica, 138 (Gennaio, 1987), 115-29
Ambrosetti, G., "Christian Natural Law," American Journal of Jurisprudence, 16 (1971), 290-301.
Anan, S., "Some Trends of Legal Thought and Natural Law Study in Japan," Natural Law Forum, 7 (1962), 109-19.
Anscombe, G. E. M., "Contraception and Natural Law," New Blackfriars, 46 (June, 1965), 517-21.
Antoine, P., "Conscience et loi naturelle," Etudes, 317 (May 1963), 162-83.
Aragones, Jay J., "Beyond Bork and Brennan: Should Catholic Law Schools Teach Natural Law?" Crisis, 8 (November, 1990), 14-19.
Arkes, Hadley, "Natural Law -- Again: Remembering the Law We Used to Know," Benchmark, V (Winter, 1993), 55-58.
________, "On Natural Rights: Speaking Prose All Our Lives," The Heritage Lecture Series, (#424), Heritage Foundation, 1992.
Arntz, Joseph T. C., "Natural Law and Its History," Moral Problems and Christian Pluralism (Concilium, V. 5), (New York: Paulist, 1965), pp. 39-57.
Ashmore, R., "Aquinas and Ethical Naturalism," New Scholasticism, 49 (Winter, 1975), 76-86.
Bandry, Gerard-Henry, "Note sur les fondaments theologiques des droits de l'homme," Melanges de Science Religieuse, 44 (March,1987), 15-28.
Baum, Gregory, "Protestants and Natural Law," The Commonweal, 73 (January 20, 1961), 427-30.
Beck, A., "Natural Law and the Reformation," Clergy Review, NS 21 (April, 1941), 73-81.
Beis, R. H., "Contraception and the Logical Structure of the Thomas Natural Law Theory," Ethics, 75 (July, 1965), 277-84.
Berger, Peter, L., "Are Human Rights Universal?" Commentary, 64 (September, 1977), 60-63,
Black, Virginia, "Reflections on Natural Law: A Critical Review of the Thought of Yves Simon," Vera Lex, IX (#2, 1989), 10-13.
Blitz, Mark, "Radical Historicism and the Meaning of Natural Right," Modern Age, 28 (Spring/Summer, 1984), 243-246.
Bochenski, J. M., "Law," Philosophy -- an Introduction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), pp. 9-19.
Bockmuhl, K., "Natural Law," Christianity Today, 22 (November 18, 1977), 59-60.
Boivin, M., "Natural Law and Cultural Norms," Afer, 20 (August, 1978), 230-35.
Bosc, Robert, "Natural Law and International Law in an Unstable International System," World Justice IV (#3, 1962-63), 316-30.
Bourke, Vernon J., "Synderesis and Right Reason," The Monist, 66 (January, 1982), 71-82.
________, "Is Thomas Aquinas a Natural Law Ethicist?" The Monist, 58 (January, 1974), 52-66.
________, "Natural Law, Thomism, and Professor Nielson," Natural Law Forum, 5 (1960), 112-19.
________, "Two Approaches to Natural Law," Natural Law Forum (#1, 1956), 92-96. [Also appears as "The Natural Law," The Commonweal, LXIV (September 7, 1956) 562-63].
________, "Review of John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights," The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 24 (1981), 243-47.
Boyle, Joseph, "The Natural Law and the Magisterium," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Association, 34 (1979), 185-210.
________, "Radical Moral Disagreement in Contemporary Health Care: A Roman Catholic Response," Journal of Medical Philosophy, 19 (April, 1994), 183-210.
Brady, Bernard, "An Analysis of the Use of Rights Language in Pre-Modern Catholic Social Thought," The Thomist, 57 (Manuary, 1993), 97-121.
Bradley, Gerald V. and Robert George, "The New Natural Law Theory: A Reply to Jean Porter," American Journal of Jurisprudence, 39 (1994), 303-16.
Bredvold, Louis I., "The Meaning of the Concept of Right Reason in the Natural Law Tradition," University of Detroit Law Review, 8 (December, 1959), 120-29.
Broderick, J. A., "Natural Law, St. Thomas, and Contemporary Problems," Dominicana, 45 (Fall, 1960), 216-40.
Brown, Brendan. F., "Natural Law," The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan, 1967), V. 10, pp. 251-56.
________, "The Natural Law as the Moral Basis of International Justice," Loyola Law Review (New Orleans), 8 (1955-56), 59-68.
Brown, J., "H. L. A. Hart's Approach to Natural Law," Cithara, 12 (May, 1973), 3-17.
Brown, O. J. P., "Aquinas Doctrine on Slavery in Relation to Thomistic Thinking on Natural Law," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Associati