ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘natural law with a variable content’ appears somewhat paradoxical. The essence of natural law, as that term is generally understood, is its unchanging, everlasting nature. For some jurists, natural law emanates from Divine revelation and reflects the immutable, eternal aspects of God’s plan for mankind. Stammler, with whom the variable concept is linked, believed that every era should have its own ‘law of nature’, its ‘right law’, which would co-exist with its positive law. The rules of the positive law would have to ‘justify’ their existence and continued use by an evaluation according to standards posed by the relevant, dominant philosophical and ethical doctrines of the era. Should a law be found wanting as a result of this evaluation, it would be corrected by further legislation or by the practice of the courts. Stammler was suggesting that in a progressive society, positive law needs to be tested regularly by the light of the community’s prevailing moral ideals, in particular.
