Natural Law and Natural Rights

John Finnis is an Australian philosopher and legal scholar whose work focuses on the philosophy of law, legal theory, and constitutional law. His most significant work is the book Natural Law and Natural Rights, first published in 1980. It concerns natural law and, above all, offers an account of why certain truths about natural law / right were overlooked or obscured in different periods. The philosophy of law presented to us by John Finnis in this book clearly belongs within the spectrum of natural-law thought. In many respects, it is closely connected with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, yet it undoubtedly also offers Finnis’s own distinctive variant speaking to the modern age. Finnis employs the means of modern rational discourse and finds original answers to questions of human good and practical reasonableness. For that reason, his theory of natural law and natural rights constitutes one of the important contributions to the modern revival of jusnaturalism. It represents the culmination of a certain intellectual line, while not amounting to a denial of the other schools within legal scholarship, but rather a correction of the imbalance that existed in this field from the mid-19th century until the end of the 20th century.
Author: John Finnis