ABSTRACT
The legal distinction between customary and natural law goes back, at least, to Aristotle, who distinguished between justice rooted in convention, and justice rooted in nature: There are two kinds of political justice: the natural and the conventional. Customary law appears to be specific to time and place, but it can be argued that common law, founded on custom, is more universal in its moral force than ‘natural justice’, the universality of which can be illusory. The legal inspiration for the law promoted by the centralizing Renaissance state was the inheritance of Roman imperial law that survived under the benefice of the Roman Catholic Church. An important justification for the creation of the centralized Renaissance state under an absolute monarch was the argument that it would allow the substitution of statutory royal justice, based on simple, rational and universal principles, for the complexities of customary and common law.
