ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book indicates some of the chief sources of the American theories of natural law. The earliest written laws of which we have any record attribute the origin, or the form, or the sanction of the laws to a divine source. Aside from the early American usage, the immediate source of the American theories of natural law was nearly always the writings of the Continental and English jurists and political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In English theory, although the conception of natural law is also that of a set of positive standards or criteria, in certain writings emphasis is placed upon that aspect of the natural law concept which in England and America is termed 'natural rights'. It is clear that many centuries of usage had produced a body of political doctrine admirably suited to the needs of American theorists.