ABSTRACT
Natural law was a subject for study by the lawyer or law student because it was helpful in understanding the principles underlying so much of a rational legal system. Two sets of issues have generated most of the battles over natural law/rights. The first has concerned starting points and background assumptions, what Cass Sunstein has called "baselines". Many of these questions have turned on definitions of what is "natural". A second set of issues also derived from controversies over what was natural. They dealt with whether legal reasoning was "natural" or "artificial" and whether law was to be derived from power and will or from reason and nature. In America, natural law/rights ideas entered into the everyday process of judicial interpretation in ways that their English counterparts would have denounced as judicial legislation. This chapter examines the intellectual history of the law-morality dichotomy in Anglo-American jurisprudence.
