Natural Law in International Legal Theory

This chapter presents an overview of three active periods of natural law scholarship bearing on international legal theory, via two stories that illustrate these to effect. The first story relates in brief the renewed attention to natural law doctrine as part of historiographical and epistemological inquiries in international law and legal theory. The second presents still another means of understanding natural law and its ongoing role in international law, namely as a dialectic by which new conceptions and vocabularies of political organization have arisen under varying historical circumstances. The chapter then traces the role of natural law doctrine as part of a linear consolidation of liberal hegemony internationally from the early modern period forward, and offers the dialectical presentation covering the same time frame. The chapter concludes by returning to how natural law continues to contribute both to the possibility of new normative programs internationally, as well as the hegemonic.

Black letter law · Comparative law · Dialectic · Doctrine · Epistemology · Hegemony · International law · Legal doctrine · Legal history · Natural (archaeology) · Natural law · Natural order · Philosophy of law · Political science · Politics · Positive law · Private law · Public law · History · International Law and Human Rights · Law · Philosophy