Natural Law and the American Constitution

When the Declaration of Independence speaks of 'the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,' it is invoking a tradition that stretches back through John Locke, through Thomas Aquinas, through Cicero, to the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. Natural law is the idea that there is a moral order built into the structure of reality — discoverable by reason, binding on all human beings, and not dependent on the will of any government for its authority.

This tradition was the intellectual foundation of the American founding. The Founders believed that rights were not granted by governments — they were inherent in human nature. Governments could recognize and protect rights, or they could violate them. But they could not create them or destroy them. That is why Jefferson wrote that rights were 'unalienable' — they could not be transferred or surrendered, because they were not possessions but attributes of personhood.

The Constitution was designed to protect natural rights against the inevitable tendency of governments to expand their power. The separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, the Bill of Rights — all of these mechanisms were grounded in a theory of human nature that the Founders had inherited from the natural law tradition. They believed that power corrupts, that majorities can tyrannize minorities, and that the only reliable check on government was a constitution that limited it.

The natural law tradition has been challenged, in the modern era, by legal positivism — the view that law is simply what governments enact, with no higher standard by which it can be judged. The Founders would have found this view dangerous. They believed that unjust laws were not truly laws at all — and that the appeal to a higher standard was not a departure from the constitutional order but its deepest foundation.