Extract
Higher Law
Americans have never been hesitant to argue that if a law is bad it must be unconstitutional. When no written constitutional provision suggests an interpretation that undermines the law under attack, American lawyers have often looked to the ancient tradition of unwritten higher law for support.It is worth distinguishing two kinds of unwritten higher law. The first is natural law, conceived by the ancient Stoics as, in Cicero's words, "right reason, harmonious, diffused among all, constant, eternal." The Stoic conception was integrated with Christian theology by the medieval scholastics, and later was reformulated in a secular and individualistic direction by the NATURAL RIGHTS theorists of the Enlightenment. In this latter form, the natural law tradition provided the intellectual background for the American colonists' assertion of "certain inalienable rights" in the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.The second kind of ...See the full content of this document
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