One idea important for thinking about the law that is related to the concept of natural law is that of natural rights. This became important at the beginning of the modern era in the 17th and 18th centuries and Locke (1632-1704) will serve us as a representative of the view. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “natural rights” often in his Two Treatises of Government, it does appear in his preface (which you can find among the texts on the Blackboard site for the course), and that may indicate that it is part of an intellectual background he takes his audience to share with him. One of the things you should do in reading these selections is to look for other places where you think he could have used the term.

Aquinas directs most of his attention to natural law as a positive source for human law, and what he has to say about limits on legitimate authority follows from this. For Locke, on the other hand, such limits are a central concern, and I have chosen passages to emphasize this. You should look for what he has to say about the source of political authority and how it leads to such limits and ask yourself whether he is right about where these limits lie. Try to decide also whether the limits he draws could be described as natural. (In one of its senses, the term “right” applies to limits on authority—that is, we have rights in this sense when there is a limit to the authority of others over us—so a natural limit on authority amounts to a kind of natural right.)

Locke’s ch. XV is one place to look for a difference between him and Aquinas. There Locke emphasizes that the power of political authorities does not have a natural source. The difference with Aquinas is not that Aquinas said it did but that Aquinas placed much less emphasis on the question of how whoever “has care of the community” came to have that care. It is reasonable that the issue would have become more important in Locke’s age with the rise of the modern state, and one of Locke’s chief aims in his book is to argue against those in his day who claimed that the authority of monarchs had a natural or even divine source.