Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern University School of Law) has posted Critiquing Hadley Arkes’s Not-So-Mere Natural Law Theory (Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: Per Curiam, No. 03, Winter 2025) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Law can't be separated from morality, because law is a kind of human conduct. So is compliance with the law. Morality constrains all of human conduct. So the idea of natural law, a set of moral constraints binding on any possible legal system, has perennial appeal.
Hadley Arkes is a leading contemporary proponent of a revived natural law. His prominence is deserved. His work is smart and learned and entertaining. He writes with admirable moral passion. He is urgently concerned that persons be treated with dignity and respect, passionate about protecting the weak and vulnerable, especially children, with an especial scorn for racism. But he is unpersuasive with respect to some of the most important legal issues he takes up: the scope of the modern administrative state, anti discrimination law, and abortion. He often ignores counterarguments. More than that, he neglects important aspects of the natural law tradition.
His most recent book is Mere Natural Law. The title echoes, and the book models itself upon, C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Lewis aimed to "explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times," centrally "that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son." Arkes aims to do the same for natural law.
Highly recommended.
