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Definition of Natural Law
Natural law. This expression, "natural law," or jus naturale, was
largely used in the philosophical speculations of the Roman jurists of the Antonine age,
and was intended to denote a system of rules and principles for the guidance of human
conduct which, independently of enacted law or of the systems peculiar to any one people,
might be discovered by the rational intelligence of man, and would be found to grow out
of and conform to his nature, meaning by that word his whole mental, moral, and physical
constitution. The point of departure for this conception was the Stoic doctrine of a
life ordered "according to nature," which in its turn rested upon the purely
supposititious existence, in primitive times, of a "state of nature;" that is, a
condition of society in which men universally were governed solely by a rational and
consistent obedience to the needs, impulses, and promptings of their true nature, such
nature being as yet undefaced by dishonesty, falsehood, or indulgence of the baser
passions. In ethics, it consists in practical universal judgments which man himself
elicits. These express necessary and obligatory rules of human conduct which have been
established by the author of human nature as essential to the divine purposes in the
universe and have been promulgated by God solely through human reason.
Source: Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition
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