Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

H. Patrick Glenn has built his idea of legal traditions, common laws, and the cosmopolitan state by observing the evolution of law. He learned a lot from legal history. But what can legal historians learn from him? In this chapter, I show that his idea of legal traditions as normative information, which has spread into all legal systems in a large recursive process of appropriation and change, can be at least very stimulating for current attempts at a global legal history. The example of the School of Salamanca, which Glenn once described as Hispanic common law and which I will introduce in the first section of this chapter, shows the opportunities, but also the limits of his approach. The latter lie, in particular, in the fact that one can hardly analyse the processes of cultural translation observed without also taking into account praxeological aspects. It is precisely these conditions of the cultural translation of normative information that may have been of particular importance for the development of what Glenn envisioned as a ‘cosmopolitan law’.

Beginning with their Master General, Cajetan, Spanish Dominicans precipitated and outlined the theological parameters for thinking about infidel dominium of peoples outside Europe as a matter of restitution and salvation. This pairing of justice and evangelization opposed the long-standing idea and practice of missionary war in the theocratic conception of world order that linked conquest and preaching and was being defended by Spanish theocratic royalists and the “modern” theology of John Mair. In 1535, after Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca, Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo Soto, and Bartolomé de las Casas drew from the inspirational example of the first Dominican missionaries to the New World and began formulating an unprecedented scholastic theological conception of world order. Appealing to Scripture, the apostolic tradition, Thomistic moral theology, Roman law, and canon law, their account of world order contained a discourse of natural subjective rights for all persons made in the divine image, attentive to restoring the injustices suffered by the Amerindians of the New World. The originality of the Spanish Dominicans, with Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis at the center, lay in their articulation of infidel rights over and against unjust European claims of expansionary religious wars waged by emperors and popes alike.