Natural Law Natural Law in philosophy, is the system of right or justice held to be common to all humankind and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law. Throughout the history of the concept, there have been disagreements over the meaning of natural law and over its relation to positive law. Aristotle held that what was "just by nature" was not always the same as what was "just by …showed first 75 words of 912 total…

…showed last 75 words of 912 total…e attempt to know nature as it really is, yet allowed the practical or moral reason to deduce a valid system of right with its own purely formal framework; and Kantian formalism contributed to the 20th-century revival of naturalistic jurisprudence. On the level of international politics in the 20th century, the assertion of human rights was the product rather of an empirical search for common values than of any explicit doctrine about a natural law.