O Direito atual é estudado como fruto exclusivo da vontade humana. Nesse sentido, a lei é pensada como produto da razão, apartada de conceitos como Moral ou Justiça. Este modelo corresponde a determinado arranjo político-social e normalmente vem associado a um conceito de Estado regulador de conflitos. Esta organização jurídico-política nem sempre existiu. O Brasil Império possuiu outra forma de conceber Direito e Sociedade, na qual o Direito Natural possuía lugar de destaque. Em São Paulo, até a Conciliação, a disciplina esteve nas mãos de liberais e significava oposição ao governo monárquico. Neste período predominou o uso do compêndio de Perreau, de início, e o de Ferrer, posteriormente. Ambos possuíam raízes no liberalismo e foram adotados pelos professores Avellar Brotero e Amaral Gurgel. Em meados do XIX passam a vicejar na Academia de Direito as tendências espiritualistas. Ali se estabeleceram as doutrinas de Krause e o Ecletismo de Jouffrouy e Cousin. Nas últimas décadas do Oitocentos a disciplina Direito Natural passa a estar nas mãos de catedráticos politicamente conservadores, como João Theodoro Xavier de Mattos, e convictos católicos, como José Maria C. de Sá e Benevides. / Current Law is studied as the exclusive fruit of human will. In this sense, the law is thought as a product of reason, apart of concepts such as Moral or Justice. This model corresponds to a certain political-social arrangement and is usually associated with a concept of State that regulates conflicts. This legal-political organization has not always existed. Brazil Empire had another way of conceiving Law and Society, in which Natural Law had a prominent place. In São Paulo, up to the Conciliation period, the discipline was in the hands of liberals and meant opposition to the monarchical government. In this period predominated the use of the compendium of Perreau, at first, and Ferrer, later. Both had roots in liberalism and were adopted by professors Avellar Brotero and Amaral Gurgel. During the mid-nineteenth century, spiritualistic tendencies flourished in the Law Academy. There they established the doctrines of Krause and the eclecticism of Jouffrouy and Cousin. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the discipline of Natural Law came to be in the hands of politically conservative professors, such as João Theodoro Xavier de Mattos, and convinced Catholics, such as José Maria C. de Sá and Benevides.

This thesis will inquire into the practicable strategies that Thomas Hobbes described in his major works of political philosophy, on the one hand, to allow his sovereign to ensure civil peace, and on the other, to enable his sovereign to defend the commonwealth. In terms of civil peace, the exercise of Hobbes's sovereign's 'absolute' authority is tempered by, and contingent on, its practical efficacy for securing and maintaining a peaceful commonwealth. To that end, I will argue that Hobbes's sovereign is obliged to rule according to the natural laws, and entailed in this obligation are coinciding liberties which Hobbes believed that subjects must perceive themselves to possess, and which sovereigns must respect, in order for peace to be realised. However, rather than situating the purpose of Hobbes's project in terms of civil peace alone—as the vast majority of his interpreters have—I consider alongside the purpose of civil peace, and contrast it with, the purpose of defence. Evident from this comparison is that the means by which Hobbes's sovereign must ensure the capability of the commonwealth to defend itself from foreign nations simultaneously undermines and counteracts his otherwise proto-liberal system. Distinct from other prominent interpretations, I will argue that this ambivalence is not a result of an imbalance between subjects' rights contra sovereign's rights, nor yet of an unsupervised agonistic counter-balance between the two. Instead, the affirmation of subjects' inalienable rights are depicted by Hobbes as a practically ineffective means by which to ensure defence. There exists a necessary ambivalence within Hobbes's theory of sovereignty itself and is to be managed solely according to the sovereign's ideally prudent and practicable judgment. Ultimately, I will characterize Hobbes as arguing that the unfortunate necessity of preparedness for foreign defensive wars is best mitigated by the sovereign's prudent and minimal exercise of the commonwealth's power in carrying out this intended purpose.

In this paper I attempt to address an interpretive difficulty that surrounds Hegel's position in the history of jurisprudence. After a brief overview of Hegel's project, I outline the first two sections of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right in order to support my argument that Hegel advocates a natural law theory of legal validity. I then show that confusions regarding Hegel's place in the history of jurisprudence arise from his view that the ethical evaluation of laws is limited (with some exceptions) to procedural laws that govern the enactment and recognition of laws in the administration of justice. I end by providing Hegel's distinctive argument for legal publicity, which he takes to be essential for the enactment and recognition of valid law.

Thesis advisor: Ken Kersch / This thesis examines the tradition of Catholic natural law conservatism in contemporary American politics. Using the works of Clarence Manion and Robert P. George, it identifies two distinct strands of natural law political philosophy. The analysis concludes with an attempt to reconcile these interpretations with the hope of providing a viable framework for the natural law in modern America. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science Honors Program. / Discipline: Political Science.

Diderot et l'Encyclopédie se propose d'enquêter sur le rapport entre ladimension anthropologique et la dimension politique: en d'autres mots,d'enquêter sur le lien qui se trouve entre une épistémologie matérialiste, et doncune nouvelle conception de l'être physiologiquement et matériellementdéterminé, et la transformation sociopolitique que l’Encyclopédie propose; unetransformation qui se concrétise au moyen de relations qui s'entrecroisent, àcaractère théorétique et cognitif (renvois), ou à caractère matériel (de l'organe àl'organisation, lutte aux corporations, division du travail, solidarité).L’hypothèse qui meut l'étude et qui, peut-être, en représente l'aspect leplus original, est l’identification de la présence d'un projet éducatif très vaste quipermettrait de maintenir ensemble, dans la pensée du philosophe de Langres,plan anthropologique et plan politique, en leur donnant, un “sens abouti” et enles empêchant de plonger dans le désespoir que le non-systématisme du procédédiderotien suscite parfois; un tel projet éducatif viserait, en paraphrasant lesThèses sur Feuerbach, à “éduquer aux éducateurs”, à faire d'eux des hommeséclairés dans une perspective de “perfectibilité matérialisée”. / My research examines the relationship between Diderot's early philosophical works and the Encyclopédie, specifically investigating the link between its anthropological and political dimensions. In other words, in my research I look at the connection between a materialist epistemology, which features a new conception of the 'human being” as a physically and physiologically determined entity, and the socio-political transformations suggested by the Encyclopédie. These transformations involve a series of intersecting relations of both theoretical-cognitive (renvois) and material nature (e.g. the shift from “organ” to “organization”, the fight to guilds, the division of labor, and the concept of solidarity).The interpretative contribution of this thesis lies in the identification of an educational project, which ties both anthropological and political aspects, and which is concerned with the materialistic education of the Third State. Quoting the Theses on Feuerbach, this educational project seems to show the necessity for educators to be enlightened too.According to this new interpretation, the Encyclopédie can no longer be considered a mere intellectual effort, and can finally become a true "revolutionary practice", a "Pensée en action". In this way, the Encyclopédie symbolizes the culmination of those organic cycles preceding every revolution (Venturi 1939), as well as a reference for those men who need take part in the "Progress" (in the mechanical sense) after the "revolution". As a result, the Encyclopédie develops into a praxis against the system, whose beating heart is represented by its relational and dialectical dimensions, which are able to generate new foundations for social life and new ways to think of politics.

This dissertation argues that a particular—and often overlooked—strand of natural law theory played an essential role in arguments for the secularization of political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between the start of the Protestant Reformation (1517) and the English Restoration (1660), European conceptions of political and legal authority underwent a series of sweeping changes. Among the most drastic of these changes was the secularization of the idea of civil authority, which consisted of three developments. First, the legitimacy of civil sovereigns was no longer dependent on religious qualifications. Heretics and pagans could hold legitimate civil authority over Christian subjects. Second, civil authority came to be seen as the product of human agency rather than divine will alone. Kings were placed on their thrones by their subjects and were thus accountable to the communities they governed. Third, civil jurisdiction was limited to the pursuit and enforcement of temporal goods: civil peace, personal security, and the public virtues necessary for these ends. Civil sovereigns no longer had the right to determine citizens’ religious, spiritual, or supernatural obligations. My dissertation demonstrates that these three developments were made possible by the philosophical framework of natural law, which was deployed by both Catholic and Protestant political thinkers of this period.

This work concentrates on the requirements of the computational system of HL, by developing the idea that Natural Law applies to universal syntactic principles. The systems of efficient growth are for the continuation of motion and maximal distance between the elements. The condition of maximization accounts for the properties of syntactic trees - binary branching, labeling, and the EPP. NL justifies the basic principle of organization in Merge: it provides a functional explanation of phase formation and thematic domains. In Optimality Theory, it accounts for the selection of a particular word order in languages. A comprehensive and definitive understanding of the principles underlying MP will eventually lead to a more advanced design of OT.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität zu Frankfurt am Main, 1971. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-203).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Regent College, 2000. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-213).

Public actors associated with the tradition of American antislavery constitutionalism in the nineteenth-century insisted that the Constitution of 1787 contained certain inbuilt purposes or animating principles, which ought to have aided constitutional interpreters in construing specific provisions of the constitutional text that related, directly or indirectly, to the law and politics of slavery in the United States. The Constitution of 1787 recognized the existence of slavery in the several states, yet antislavery constitutionalists interpreted even the slavery-related clauses as aspiring toward a certain liberal constitutional vision that was not yet a reality. In this dissertation, I argue, first, that these nineteenth-century interpretations of the Constitution in antislavery terms were intricately bound up with theories of natural law, and, second, I suggest that this aspect of the antislavery constitutional tradition offers a strong interpretive challenge (both descriptive and normative) to various aspects of the current scholarly literature on constitutional development and constitutional theory. / text