Introduction -- Europe's Chinese vogue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- François Quesnay and A. R. J. Turgot: Two admirers of China -- The natural order.-Tableau Économique -- Laissez faire -- Agricultural primacy -- Single impôt territorial, population, and property ownership...

Natural law has burst onto the American legal scene with the publication of Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism (2022). A prominent constitutional and administrative law scholar, Vermeule castigates originalist jurisprudence as a fraudulent illusion perpetuated by conservatives to...

This paper argues that the Christian conception of Natural law is indispensable for the understanding of a coherent moral theory of the State. The paper discusses the Christian conception of Natural Law with a view to understanding a philosophical link with the moral theory of the State. The...

The Biblical Natural Law of the Founding Fathers provides a better basis for contract law than the Law and Economic Theory. The Law and Economics Theory distorts the roles of judges and goes against the proper rooting of contract in the individual rights to own property and to enter contracts

The Speluncen Cave Explorers Judicial Opinion address whether murder is permitted by the need for survival. The paper addresses Judge Posner's Law and Economics theory which holds that the defendants were justified by the need for survival to undertake the killing. Posner's opinion is rebutted...

With the evolution of the modern natural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the natural laws which the sciences discovered also became a model for the understanding of legal, social and economic “laws”, ideally with qualities similar to the laws of physics. However, legal...

New biotechnologies promise to revolutionize human existence — not only by delivering therapeutic treatments and cures, but also by offering physical and mental “enhancements”: creating stronger bodies and more powerful minds for ourselves and for the children we will carefully select....

Contemporary legal philosophy is predominantly anti-naturalistic. This is true of natural law theory, but also, more surprisingly, of legal positivism. Several prominent legal philosophers have in fact argued that the kind of questions that legal philosophers are interested in cannot be...

John Locke was one of the first shareholders of the Bank of England and participated in Parliamentary debates surrounding its creation. He had a key role in the monetary reform of 1696. This book examines Locke's thought in relation to credit, banking regulation, the monetary and financial...

The task of the present article is twofold. First, it represents an attempt to make an original English language contribution to the continuing interdisciplinary inquiry, begun in France, into the presence of law in Balzac's The Human Comedy, by focusing upon themes and novels that have not been...

Natural law principles played an important role in the early development of international legal theory, but were subsequently displaced by positivist ideals. Within the past half-century, fundamental changes in international society have revealed the limitations of a purely positivist approach...

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Jefferson’s Laws of Nature -- Chapter 3. From Natural Law to Natural Inferiority -- Chapter 4. Seasteading and Polycentric Law -- Chapter 5. Justice Holmes and Pragmatic Pluralism -- Chapter 6. Pragmatic Conservatism -- Chapter 7. Dissenting Opinions...

One tends to think of corporate law as quite formalistic, bound by corporate statutes, articles of incorporation, bylaws, and customary rules of commercial conduct. While many aspects of corporate law are indeed so rule-bound, the truth is that the major issues facing directors, officers and...

The contemporary international refugee system was the product of a desire to provide protection and assistance to those who have a well-founded fear of persecution, a somewhat sophistic term in the twenty-first century. Increasingly, however, the system is being challenged by states seeking to...

Corporate governance scholarship is awash with theories of the firm: these are "stories" or metaphors that try to shed light on the nature and purpose of the firm as an institution and on one or more of the following questions: (i) how the institution of the firm "evolved" (or its economic or...

The question whether it is possible to be both a Humean and a contractarian arises from the interpretation of Hume as a theorist of spontaneous order, a theory that is usually taken to be incompatible with contractarianism. I argue that this interpretation is unconvincing and anachronistic. The...

The paper examines the inconspicuous influence of the legacy of the classical natural law of the 18th century on Russian dogmatic jurisprudence of civil law, taking as an example the authoritative “Course on civil law” (1868-1880) by Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Despite the dogmatic purpose of...

This book offers a vision of economics in which there is no place for universal laws of nature, and even for laws of a more probabilistic character. The author avoids interpreting the practice of economics as something that leads to the formulation of universal laws or laws of nature. Instead,...

Freiheit ohne innere Bindung? / Paul Kirchhof -- Recht un d Gerechtigkeit : zum aristotelisch-thomistischen Naturrechtsverständnis / Horst Ehmann -- Ohne die Person ist alles nichts : Person und Gesellschaft in der Sozialverkündigung Johannes Pauls II und Benedikts XVI / Lothar Roos -- " Was...

The Rule of Law faces critical challenges both at home and abroad. At home, legal indeterminacy and the ontological gap between legal theory and practice defy resolution by contemporary normative theories of law. Legal indeterminacy raises the specter that judicial decisions in hard cases are...

The paper develops a theoretical approach to copyright law centred on authorial right, yet capable of accounting for the public interest in access to and dissemination of intellectual creations. The paper questions the deployment of Locke's labour theory of property in the formulation of a...