The Decline of Natural Law:
How American Lawyers Once Used Natural Law and Why They Stopped
by stuart banner
oxford university press, 264 pages, $49.95
Dending on one’s perspective, natural law is either a dead letter or a pivotal issue. No contemporary lawyer or judge would cite natural law in a courtroom or judicial opinion. Few philosophers or theologians, on the other hand, would discuss moral law without highlighting natural law. That division has not always been so. Stuart Banner has done us a great service by charting the rise and fall of natural law in American jurisprudence alongside accompanying historical and cultural developments.
His thesis is simple: At the time of the American founding, natural law was an integral part of our social and legal culture and was regularly used by American lawyers, judges, and law professors through the mid-to late 1800s. After that time,