ABSTRACT
Natural justice has a close association with natural law which has a history dating back to the Greeks in the 6th century BC.
Whereas legal positivism asserts that persons possess only those rights that have been granted by human made law, natural law maintains that:
• individuals have certain inalienable human rights which at all times have been reflected in universally accepted standards of justice;
• those standards of justice require some minimum protection of human rights;
• a valid law is one which: ❍ conforms to generally accepted standards of reason,
reasonableness and justice (that is, ‘rational humaneness’, to use the words of the 19th century radical John Morley); and
You should be familiar with the following areas:
• the hearing rule, the bias rule and the ‘no evidence’ rule • the types of cases in which the courts will imply a duty to act
fairly • the circumstances in which the hearing rule may be excluded
or displaced or may simply not apply • the different tests to determine bias
Initially, only courts of law and court-like bodies were required to accord natural justice.
