Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1960

Publication Information

5 Nat. L.F. 83 (1960)

Abstract

Like most terms "natural law" has had, and has, a variety of meanings. In most of its meanings it touches scarcely at all the professional concerns of the lawyer but moves, rather, on a plane widely separated from his daily cares and duties. Thus, for the most part, natural law stands aloof from the urgent here-and-now with which lawyer and judge necessarily are preoccupied; it inhabits a world apart.

In these remarks I hope to suggest an approach to natural law which will make it useful on a day-to-day basis in the perplexities by which practitioners and judges constantly are confronted. I shall talk more about the judge than about the practitioner, though I have been the latter but never the former. I make no apology, however, since, after all, it is not necessary to be a concert artist to distinguish between a baritone and a basso.

Specifically, I suggest that natural law fruitfully may be regarded as the contribution which ethics can make to law.

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