Natural Law Lecture

Prof. Mark Murphy, Georgetown Law School will deliver the lecture “Some Unhappy Dilemmas for Natural Law Jurisprudence.”

Recently, critics of natural law jurisprudence have tried to undermine the prospects for this account of law’s nature without having to confront the central arguments for the natural law view. Instead, these critics have argued that the very task of trying to provide an account of law’s nature is wrongheaded, or that even if law does have a nature, any interpretation of the natural law account is doomed to be either hopelessly implausible or indistinguishable from its positivist rivals. In this lecture I will formulate these challenges as dilemmas for natural law jurisprudence, and show how natural law theorists can escape them.