Law and the Humanities
Law seeks to organize human behavior through the repetition, interpretation, and canonization of a set of speech acts. As such, the study of law is an unavoidably hermeneutic discipline, and thus an avoidably humanistic one. Yet the central role that law plays in the structure and spread of markets, states, and new technologies also invites – demands – study by the quantitative social sciences. In recent decades, the philosophical assumptions and methodological protocols of those newer disciplines have come to dominate the study of law. Yet at a moment when our economic and political horizons are increasingly defined by the capacity of machines to replicate human speech and understanding, hermeneutic problems return in force. The Law and Humanities Initiative provides an ongoing forum to explore the ties that continue to bind together legal order, linguistic competence, historical memory, and the human imagination.
Initiatives
Program in Natural Law
Since the publication of H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law in 1961, positivism has not only dominated Anglophone legal philosophy but also delimited the horizon of social theorizing about law. Contemporary positivism holds that law is the exclusive product of contingent facts about social practice. So described, the implicit theoretical commitments of contemporary positivism reflect a trend familiar to humanists and social scientists: skepticism about transhistorical claims concerning human nature. Natural lawyers, by contrast, argue that the very act of identifying a legal system, whether well-functioning or defective, requires the exercise of practical or evaluative—as opposed to merely empirical and interpretive—judgment and that this judgment is universally accessible to, and binding upon, humans by virtue of their common humanity. For the past fifty years, natural law has constituted a kind of minor literature within American legal thought, a religious trespasser in a secular age. But no more.
Today, assumptions and argumentative strategies long familiar to natural lawyers are making their mark on field-defining legal scholarship. Several of the Roberts Court’s most controversial doctrinal innovations can be most satisfyingly understood and coherently defended as exercises in natural law reasoning. Yet, notwithstanding the current Supreme Court’s affinities for it, natural law is not simply a partisan project, as evidenced by the Founding generation’s own commitments to natural law reasoning. For legal positivists, the revival of interest in natural law has reopened the question whether law is best understood as the contingent and indeterminate product of human decision-making or rather as a functional response to the imperatives of production and social reproduction.
The Program in Natural Law seeks to bring together scholars across the academy to deepen our understanding of these debates and their intellectual precursors. The current natural law revival affords a rare opportunity to treat the study of law as a genuine branch of the human sciences, beset by all the fraught questions of methodology and purpose that constitute that broader field. The Program, in turn, would contribute to the development and critique of the natural law revival itself by foregrounding lesser-known perspectives on the topic from history, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, and comparative literature.
