ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth century, natural law theory gradually degenerated into a theory of rights: Human behavior, on this view, may or may not be guided by social instincts, but —and this is the crux —human reason is able to discern the existence of certain rights, which would have been enjoyed in the state of nature. The fate of natural law theory is linked, inextricably, with the rest of legal theory. Law has become, in general, a matter of rational decision-making aimed at upholding social interest and/or abstract principles of equity. Before settling for a rationalist view of natural law we might try to rediscover the older view of law by looking at the other provisions-universality, innateness, and transcendence. The primary data of natural law consist of the customs and institutions that seem universal in human societies. It is, admittedly, hard to make a generalization to which there are no exceptions.
