This research handbook is a useful and, to a large extent, refreshing approach to the natural law tradition. In the preface, the editors argue that one core aim of the handbook is to counter the universalizing perception of natural law as inherently socially conservative, a predominant view since the 1980s. The editors specifically point to the influence of such commentators as John Finnis and Germain Grisez, who indeed have put forth such work in prior decades. The editors’ aim instead is “to highlight the breadth and diversity of the natural law outlook.” This approach involves “provid[ing] a snapshot of current research on natural law in ethics, politics and law,” in addition to “showcasing the rigour, versatility and enduring relevance of the tradition.” In particular, numerous contributions in the handbook succeed in articulating how natural law theory, as necessarily re-envisioned, might shed light on many of our most intractable social, political, and environmental problems.
Opening chapters of the handbook focus on Western foundations for natural law and more diverse global texts and traditions; the latter half turns to normative concepts and the intersection of natural law and governance per se. The Western chapters provide a sound, compelling historical overview of leading natural law commentators. Coverage includes Aristotle, the classical era Stoics, and treatments on St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and others. Thereafter, numerous chapters very fruitfully explore alternative natural law perspectives found in, for instance, Judaism and Islamic legal and theological traditions.
Norman P. Ho's Natural Law in Confucianism constitutes an especially illuminating chapter that merits special attention. Ho, as part of a broader historic and contemporary analysis, argues that “Neo-Confucianism is the most promising source of natural law thinking in the Confucian tradition,” as informed by both Daoism and Buddhism. This tradition, which Ho examines in the context of Wang Yangming's thought, “adverts to an ultimate standard—the human heart-mind (xin), which is equivalent to the Heavenly Principle (Tianli)—that is grounded in human reason,” and such “an ultimate standard” also “can provide the correct answers” when investigating legal questions. Ho concludes that there exists “remarkable continuity in natural law ideas and views on law from ancient China to the present day,” and his overarching contribution demonstrates aptly how the natural law tradition is at work in diverse global contexts—a key strength of the handbook.
Notable chapters in this section discuss how natural law thought intersects with issues along lines of race, gender and sex, and the environment. Vincent Lloyd's Black Natural Law constitutes one such important contribution. Lloyd investigates how the “recovery of the black natural law tradition,” as reflected by Anna Julia Cooper, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, may add crucial contours to “today's racial justice activism” that has largely eschewed natural law rhetoric to date. Lloyd's chapter thus has important implications for contemporary justice movements along these and related lines.
Catherine Carol also provides a standout contribution in Luce Iragaray on Women and Natural Law. Carol observes that a foundational “problem of the destructive and dehumanising propensities of modern culture begins with the idea that human society is a triumph over the natural world.” But, of course, all human societies are merely part and parcel of ecological systems, and Carol thus examines such material realities through a niche natural law lens wherein sexual difference occupies primacy of place. Through this approach, a materially conceived female subject, as compared to a supposed “universal legal subject,” embodies understandings based on relationality and intersubjective social meanings, as “recognised through their embeddedness within the material and everyday exigencies of nature and others.” Such alternative values could then structurally inform novel economic, political, and legal arrangements in accordance with nature's material realities, through which we might cultivate a deeply ecologically sustainable “culture of life.” Carol's contribution thus raises radical possibilities for natural law-informed social change.
Chapters on normative concepts and law and governance per se provide often-intriguing and expansive explorations. Coverage includes examinations of virtue and natural law, imagination and natural law, and the relationship between natural law and natural justice. Eoin Carolan's Natural Law and Constitutional Reasoning is a notable contribution in this section. Carolan thoughtfully examines how natural law reasoning in Irish Constitutional interpretation has transitioned from “religious interpretation” to such concepts as dignity and justice, which also “echo the more widespread contemporary rhetoric of universal human rights.” That human rights, as necessarily re-envisioned to meet the exigencies of current global crises, are a source of intensive study among many socio-legal scholars, further illustrates the significance of Carolan's contribution and related chapters in the handbook that explore natural law reconceptualizations.
The handbook's strengths ultimately include its cogent overview of the long natural law tradition, importantly extending well beyond familiar Western perspectives. Moreover, numerous handbook contributors explicitly put forth novel articulations of how contemporary natural law might prove useful in informing modes of transformative change—although additional treatment along these lines would have been welcome. Nevertheless, in an overarching sense, the handbook succeeds in informing one key vision articulated by the editors: namely, that a revitalized natural law tradition “holds potentially radical implications for how we conceive of our social arrangements,” as we could “engage in deeper forms of discourse about the forms of life we wish to nurture in our communities and how they connect with our shared project of human flourishing.” Such is a worthy goal for a discourse that has been defined by often-problematic work in recent decades, and thus the handbook will be of considerable benefit to students and scholars in potentially diverse disciplines.
