Natural Law School — KSLU Jurisprudence Notes

Natural Law School

The oldest school: law derives its authority from a higher moral order — divine reason, nature, or human conscience — and an unjust enactment is not truly law (lex injusta non est lex). Its journey runs from the Greeks and Aquinas (eternal, natural, divine and human law) through Grotius (natural law as the basis of international law) to its 20th-century revival after the Nazi era — Fuller’s “inner morality of law” and Radbruch’s formula that intolerably unjust law forfeits validity. In India its imprint is visible in the basic structure doctrine (Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, 1973) and in due-process reasoning (Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, 1978).