An account of a fundamental change in American legal thought, from a conception of law as something found in nature to one in which law is entirely a human creation. Before the late 19th century, natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers routinely used it in their arguments and judges often relied upon it in their opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal system. When natural law was part of a lawyer's toolkit, lawyers thought of judges as finders of the law, but when natural law dropped out of the legal system, lawyers began thinking of judges as makers of the law instead. In The Decline of Natural Law, the eminent legal historian Stuart Banner explores the causes and consequences of this change. To do this, Banner discusses the ways in which lawyers used natural law and why the concept seemed reasonable to them. He further examines several long-term trends in legal thought that weakened the position of natural law, including the use of written constitutions, the gradual separation of the spheres of law and religion, the rapid growth of legal publishing, and the position of natural law in some of the 19th century's most contested legal issues. And finally, he describes both the profession's rejection of natural law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the ways in which the legal system responded to the absence of natural law. The first book to explain how natural law once worked in the American legal system, The Decline of Natural Law offers a unique look into how and why this major shift in legal thought happened, and focuses, in particular, on the shift from the idea that law is something we find to something we make.

Titles appearing in SciTech Book News ? March 2008Arrangement is by title. Visit publisher's website The decline of nature; environmental history and the Western worldview.LaFreniere, Gilbert F.Academica Press, LLC, ?2007 457 p. $74.95 GF75978-1-933146-40-9This book is a historical review of changing Western worldviews towards humanity's relationship with the environment, which is to a significant extent, in the eyes of the author, determined by worldviews on the nature of history itself. Both the views arising out of Christian providential views of history and those based on the idea of endless progress in technological innovation and economic growth are argued to be incapable of confronting today's massive environmental problems. The author calls for resurrecting and extensively modifying a version of the cyclical view of history described by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. (Annotation ?2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The law of nature -- The common law -- The adoption of written constitutions -- The separation of law and religion -- The explosion in law publishing -- The two-sidedness of natural law -- The decline of natural law and custom --Substitutes for natural law -- Echoes of natural law.

In this volume, prominent political theorist Michael Zuckert presents an important and pathbreaking set of meditations on the thought of John Locke. In more than a dozen provocative essays, many appearing in print for the first time, Zuckert explores the complexity of Locke's engagement with his philosophical and theological predecessors, his profound influence on later liberal thinkers, and his amazing success in transforming the political understanding of the Anglo-American world. At the same time, he also demonstrates Locke's continuing relevance in current debates involving such prominent thinkers as Rawls and MacIntyre. Zuckert's careful reconsideration of Locke's role as "launcher" of liberalism involves a sustained engagement with the hermeneutical issues surrounding Locke, an innovator who faced special rhetorical needs in addressing his contemporaries and the future. It also involves highlighting the novelty of Locke's position by examining his stance toward the philosophical and religious traditions in place when he wrote. Zuckert argues that neither of the dominant ways of understanding Locke's relations to his predecessors and contemporaries is adequate; he is not well seen as a follower of any orthodoxy nor of any anti-orthodoxy of his day, either philosophical or theological. He found a path to innovation that was philosophically radical but which was also able to connect with prevailing and accepted traditions. That allowed him to exercise a practical influence in history rarely, if ever, matched by any other philosopher. Zuckert illustrates that influence by showing how William Blackstone used Lockean philosophy to reshape the common law and how the Americans of the eighteenth century used Lockean philosophy to reshape Whig political thought. Zuckert argues that Locke's philosophy has continuing philosophic and political force, a proposition he demonstrates by arguing that Locke presents a form of political philosophy superior to that of the liberal theorists of our day and that he has solid rejoinders to contemporary critics of liberalism.