Natural Law

• Natural law

• Assisted Migration: Redefining Nature and Natural Resource Law Under Climate Change

To avoid extinctions and other harms to ecological health from escalating climatic change, scientists, resource managers, and activists are considering and even engaging in "assisted migration" -- the intentional movement of an organism to an area in which its species has never existed. This article explores the profound implications of climate change for American natural resource management through the lens of this controversial adaptation strategy. It details arguments regarding the scientific viability and legality of assisted migration under the thicket of laws that govern natural resources in the US. The article explains why contemporary natural resource law's fidelity to historic baselines, protecting preexisting biota, and shielding nature from human activity is increasingly unte...

• Yale Journal on Regulation
• Vol. 27 Nbr. 2, July 2010

• Natural Law Constitutional Interpretation

§ 12.1 Introduction to Natural Law Decisionmaking. § 12.2 Defining the Natural Law Style of Constitutional Interpretation. § 12.2.1 Treatment of Contemporaneous Sources of Interpretation. § 12.2.1.1 Treatment of Text. § 12.2.1.2 Treatment of Context. § 12.2.1.3 Treatment of History. § 12.2.2 Treatment of Subsequent Developments. § 12.2.2.1 Legislative, Executive, and Social Practice. § 12.2.2.2 Judicial Precedents. § 12.2.2.3 Prudential Considerations. § 12.3 Variations in the Natural Law Approach. § 12.3.1 Summary of the Basic Natural Law Approach. § 12.3.2 Extreme versus Moderate Natural Law. § 12.3.3 Conservative versus Liberal Natural Law. § 12.4 The Natural Law Approach, Combined with Affinity for Another Style. § 12.4.1 Natural Law Combined with Formalist Interpretation. § 12.4.2 ...

• The Path of Constitutional Law
• Part II: The Form Or Shape Of Constitutional Law

• Natural law, Franckly speaking.

Matthew Franck has been a friend, and I know he was seeking to be generous of spirit in his review of my new book ("The Lawful Truth," October 2010). ...

• First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
• Nbr. 2011, January 2011

• Cicero, Aquinas, and Contemporary Issues in Natural Law Theory

[...] reason stands at a considerable remove from the realm of concrete reality within which particular human actions occur, and by this distance is rendered incompetent to perform its traditional function of directing toward virtue or restraining from vice. [...] while St. Thomas's Summa Theologica remains the locus classicus for natural law theory, this theory acquires more force and persuasiveness when it is placed at the summit of a preceding tradition of thought than when it is relegated to the foothills of an emerging one.

• Review of Metaphysics, The
• Vol. 62 Nbr. 3, March 2009

• Natural Law

The unwritten body of universal moral principles that underlie the ethical and legal norms by which human conduct is sometimes ev...

• West's Encyclopedia of American Law
• Mc–Pl

• Consideration As Contract: A Secular Natural Law of Contracts

To justify the logical transition from factual observation to moral proclamation, Aquinas explicitly appealed to Biblical allegory-arguing that God would not have given people dominion over fish unless He intended them to have control over the necessaries of life.21 With similar reliance on religious doctrine, Aquinas argued that the Christian virtue of charity should limit the extent of one's lawful property holdings,22 and he did not reject the idea that a community body should be charged with overseeing property distribution, apparently to effectuate observance of the virtue of charity.23 Aquinas' theological arguments suggest that he took the Golden Rule as his ethical premise. The injunction to love one's neighbor provided the logical transition between the observation of a need a...

• Texas Review of Law & Politics
• Vol. 12 Nbr. 2, April 2008

• The Post-Ratification Consensus Agreements of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol: Law or Politics? An Analysis of Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA

This Note addresses the legal status of the post-ratification consensus Decisions of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol. The discussion covers the background to the Montreal Protocol and the incorporation of the United States' treaty commitments under the Protocol in the Clean Air Act. It then examines the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 464 F.3d 1 (2006), in which that court determined that the parties' consensus Decisions represent political commitments, not law cognizable in U.S. courts. This Note critiques the court's justifications for concluding that the Decisions are not law applicable in the courts. It then considers the negotiating records and examples of party practice on the int...

• Iowa Law Review
• Nbr. 93-2, February 2008

• Natural rights trump Obamacare, or should: only the natural law, writes Hadley Arkes, can explain the deep wrongs of the recent health-care bill.

Past the politics of Obamacare--the tawdry buying of votes, the spectacle of representatives in a republic passing into law bills of two thousand-plus...

• First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
• Nbr. 2011, January 2011

• A train without tracks: rethinking the place of law and goals in environmental and natural resources law.

I. INTRODUCTION II. NEW THINKING IN ENVIRONMENTAL AND NATURAL RESOURCES LAW A. Responding to the Scientists: Ecosystem Management 1. Ecological Founda...

• Environmental Law
• Vol. 38 Nbr. 4, September 2008

• Natural law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the legal philosopher and judge whom Richard Posner has, with admiration, dubbed "the American Nietzsche," (1) established in t...

• Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
• Vol. 31 Nbr. 1, January 2008