Rome and the Middle Ages

Although many aspects of ancient Greek culture had continuing influence throughout the Roman Empire from the 1st century bce onward, law was not one of them. The Romans established new legal forms and institutions as well as the first legal professionals and administrators. Roman jurists developed the first form of what would later be called “legal science,” and a new genre of legal writing was invented in service of this discipline, in which jurists would collect and organize Roman law according to complex taxonomies. This practice culminated in the Digest (Digesta), assembled by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565 ce), a work that eventually served as the basis of many modern legal systems of western Europe. But whereas Greek law faded in influence, the Greek legacy in the philosophy of law was to endure for several centuries, extending through the Middle Ages, during which there were many refinements and extensions of Greek themes and ideas, particularly within the Christian tradition.

The Roman jurist and philosopher Cicero (106–43 bce) articulated the first, and some would say definitive, conception of what is called “natural law.” Although Cicero was a legal practitioner and was versed in the positive (human-enacted) law of the Roman state, he sought to situate it in relation to what he considered objective moral truths, which he also called “laws” (thus the tendency of many writers up to the present day to refer to timeless moral truths as “natural law”). In his work De republica (On the Republic), he famously held, echoing Sophocles, that:

true law is right reason in agreement with nature…to curtail this law is impious, to amend it illicit, to repeal it impossible…nor will it be one law at Rome and a different one at Athens, but one and the same Law, eternal and unchangeable.

This more-capacious conception of law set rather strict moral conditions that putative positive (human-created) law must meet in order to qualify as real law: “Those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but ‘laws.’ ”

Cicero’s idea that there are moral criteria for determining the validity of positive law gained currency in the centuries that followed. St. Augustine of Hippo’s (354–430 ce) later succinct claim that “an unjust law does not seem to be a law at all” served for centuries as a kind of slogan of the natural-law tradition, despite the assertions of some critics that it was obscure or contradictory.

Natural-law theory was given its first systematic treatment by the great Christian philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–74). Aquinas generally worked within the conceptual framework and basic principles of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, value, and politics but often extended and modified them in novel ways; this is especially so in the case of his philosophy of law. Aquinas defined law in part as an “ordinance of reason”—that is, a prescription that is both produced (by lawmakers) and responded to (by subjects) through an exercise of the distinctive human capacity of reason. He claimed, in terms clearer than in previous theories, that law had by nature a distinctive point or purpose. In the most-abstract sense, the purpose of law is to serve the common good of a political community. More concretely, law is a promulgated plan of coordination whereby a society can realize goods (both tangible and intangible) that cannot be achieved by other means.

Aquinas’s central natural-law thesis is that valid positive law is necessarily derived from objective moral principles (or moral truths). This derivation can occur in two ways. First, law can be derived by a kind of immediate deduction from moral principles, such that there is a direct correspondence in content between a moral and a legal rule. For example, from the moral principle that murder is wrong, the legal prohibition of homicide may be formulated and enacted. Second, law can be derived from morality by a more-indirect process, which Aquinas called (in Latin) determinatio—determination or specification of how a general moral principle applies in specific circumstances to facilitate human coordination. Much of positive law, he claimed, was derived from morality in this second way. A standard modern example is traffic laws requiring that people drive on one side of the road or the other. Of course, morality does not require specifically that humans drive on the right or on the left, but once a determination by a legitimate political authority has been made, a law that, for instance, requires driving on the left will be binding on citizens in virtue of its, albeit indirect, connection to general moral principles—e.g., principles that require persons not to expose others to undue risk of serious harm or that require the facilitation of commerce to meet basic needs, and so on. Aquinas held that if positive law is not derived from valid moral principles in either of these two ways, then, to recall Augustine’s slogan, such laws are “unjust” and fail to be “law.” As a consequence, they fail to have any binding authority such that citizens have an obligation to obey them. Aquinas’s account of the relation between law and morality is made more complex by his account of who is most suitable to serve as ruler and as legislator. The concepts of an authoritative lawmaker and of morally binding laws made by that person are correlates. The point of law is to serve the common good, and if a candidate legislator is able to do that effectively by exercising political rule, then Aquinas goes so far as to say that such a person has an obligation to govern. Legitimate political authorities are those who are motivated by “the care of the community,” and any law created from other motivations is a distinct form of injustice that can also invalidate positive law.