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Portuese on Natural Law & International Legal Order

By Lawrence Solum

Aurélien Portuese (University of Paris 2 Pantheon-Assas) has posted A Natural Jurisprudential Account of Current International and European Laws Orders on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The fact that Natural Law approaches are being ridiculed by numerous scholars is both questionable and regrettable. The same can be said for International Law where a complete positivistic approach to International Law and Relations substituted the original International Natural Law. The purpose of this paper is first of all to elaborate a philosophical analysis of the International Natural Law, and secondly to demonstrate that Natural Law is useful to apprehend some current issues in International Law and thus is not confined to a pure History of Law. In order to defend the Natural Law approach to International Law, the better way is to demonstrate the finitude of International Natural Law under a philosophical perspective (I). The principles contained in International Natural Law are either applicable under the law of peace (A) or of war (B). The philosophical conclusions drawn from the first part will be extrapolated to the current European construction in order to analyze this enterprise (II), stating both a description (A) and a critic with from natural law perspective(B).

This interesting paper also illustrates the gap between some European approaches to general jurisprudence and the Anglophone tradition roughly associated with so-called "analytic jurisprudence." There is no mention in this paper of Hart, Raz, Coleman, Finnis, or Dworkin, or for that matter, Hans Kelsen (or their ideas), making it difficult to assess the content from my perspective.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 10, 2010 (boomark / email).