No doctrine of jurisprudence has so distinguished a history as the theory of the natural law. One of its earliest and noblest expressions is to be found in Sophocles, when Antigone refuses to obey Creon’s unjust commands and appeals to a law greater than human ordinance. In the form given to it by Greek Stoicism it was received and developed by the Roman philosophers and jurists; through St Isidore it passed into the middle ages where it found its most perfect expression in St Thomas Aquinas. It was adopted and applied by the Dutch Protestant jurists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it is still embraced by most Catholic thinkers today. It links the pagan and Christian traditions from classical antiquity to the twentieth century; and while its independence of supernatural revelation can be said to give it value as a praeparatio evangelica, its perfect consonance with dogma has led to its almost universal adoption in Catholic thought.

This very acceptance by Catholics has, however, led to a great deal of confusion and to the advancement of some exaggerated and often meaningless claims. It may be useful to subject the natural law doctrine to an analysis based largely on theoretical and practical jurisprudence. Such an analysis will reveal the inadequacy of much that is commonly said about the doctrine as a possible theory of law and will illustrate, perhaps, why few lawyers show much enthusiasm for it.