In Defense of Classical Natural Law in Legal Theory: Why Unjust Law is No Law at All

More than 700 years separate us from St. Thomas Aquinas and his assertion in the Summa Theologica that unjust law "seems to be no law at all."1 In the time that has passed, this brief remark has been mocked, applauded, reinterpreted, and ignored. The mocking came mostly at the hands of the classical legal positivists, like Austin and Bentham, who insisted that nothing but confusion would result if we failed to separate the question of what law is from the question whether it is just or unjust. Here, for example, is Austin, at his most derisive, ridiculing Blackstone's echo of Aquinas.