NARRATOR: Thanks for joining this episode of the No. 86 lecture series, where we discuss classical and modern Jurisprudence. Today’s episode features Eric Claeys, Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. In his scholarship, he studies theories of natural law and natural rights and their implications in property law. Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Torts, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speaker. PUBLIUS: Professor Claeys, what is “natural” about law? Aren’t most laws artificial constructs by a particular community? ERIC CLAEYS: So in the phrase natural law, natural means a few different things at once. One is that a principle or an idea is natural if somebody can use his or her own rational faculties to understand it without help from any other source, including any other higher source. and a principle's also natural if it's a principle about the way people ought to deal with each other. A principle's natural if it's something that you can see or identify coming out of human nature. A principle's also natural if it's something that has a validity, whether or not a community has said: this is part of what we do. So a community can say we have a traffic law, and that traffic law is a convention. The traffic law by itself doesn't make it so that people have rights to travel and rights to be safe. The speed limit sets the community's estimate, like what speed limit's going to secure those rights, but the rights are valid whether or not the community had respected them at all with its own traffic law. Natural law was clearly understood as a distinct discipline by the Middle Ages with a lot of theologians and philosophers in the Catholic tradition. The stoics during the Roman Empire, they worked out the principles that were maybe the first settled understanding of natural law. law ,and then Cicero did similar work. And so those are probably the two sources where natural law first kind of congealed and became a distinct way of thinking, and then Catholic Thinkers appropriated what the stoics and Cicero taught and developed a systematic philosophy out of it. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a work called The Summa Theologica, and it's a systematic treatment of theology, and it treats a lot of different parts of human life in the rubric of theology. And one of the many topics in human life that Thomas talks about is law. And Thomas offers there a definition of law, and that definition's kind of taken as the paradigm definition of law from a natural law point of view. And in Thomas's view, a law has four different features: a law consists of an ordinance of reason, and it's an ordinance of reason directed to the common good, it's made by the community or someone in due care of the community, and the ordinance has been promulgated. And there's one last feature that's not an element of his definition, but it's a way of understanding what this definition does. Thomas, says that this definition applies to essential cases of law, what we might call central cases of law, not to what he calls participative understandings of law, what we might call borderline understandings of law. So, he thinks that the ideal law is an ordinance of reason directed at the common good, made by the community or someone in due care of it, and it's promulgated, and he understands that there can be borderline laws that have some, but not all these features. Because Aquinas defines law by an essential case, he admits that there are laws that can be borderline laws, and he admits for several different kinds of borderline laws. One example would be: imagine a law that is just, it's ordered toward the common good, but the people in charge have done a bad job of posting notice of it. So that would be a law that is an ordinance of reason, directed to the common good. It's been made by the right people, but if they haven't posted it clearly, it's not so well promulgated. So it's law in three of the four senses, but it's not law in the fourth sense. More controversially, what about a law that's grossly unjust? So, like an order by the Nazi government to kill Jews. It's made by the people in due care of the community and it's been promulgated, but it's not for the common good of the community because it's directing the extermination of some people in the community, and there's no just basis for doing that. So, about that kind of law to Thomas's account would say, laws that are not just are gonna seem strange, or imperfect, or incomplete, because they have some of the four features of law, but they're not directed toward the common good. And some laws might be laws that people kind of have knots in their stomach about or queasy feelings about, but they know: yeah, they're still laws. But then some laws are so blatantly unjust, like that extermination order, that they're not law at all. And Thomas's definition of law leaves it ambiguous how unjust a law needs to be before it ceases to be law in any case whatsoever. Thomas's account of law, a teleological account. Teleology means the idea that some object has an end, and there are lots of objects that we recognize readily have ends. The simplest examples would be living things that don't have reason. Seeds have the end of growing into trees. Animals have the end of breeding, procreating, and then doing certain things that we associate with those animals. And then another example of things that uncontroversially ends would be simple tools. A paper clip is an object with an end. It has the end of holding together paper. And when, objects have ends like this, the end gives somebody who is working with the object a built in standard to know whether you're dealing with an excellent version of the object, an inferior version of the object, or something that even if someone claims it's an instance of the object, it's just a preposterous ludicrous example of the object. PUBLIUS: How does this apply to society or individual people? ERIC CLAEYS: Now that same way of thinking can apply to human life too. It does apply with a lot more controversy. But if you take for granted or you stipulate that this other approach applies to human life, then people have ends. And in the natural law tradition, people have the end of becoming happy or flourishing people. And then in community, people can prosper collectively too. If people are going to prosper collectively, they need some central authority to create rules of the road for them all to know what they have to do in relation to each other, and so in an account of natural law, people need to flourish, people have the end of flourishing, people since they're social creatures should flourish together. But if they're going to flourish together, there needs to be some coordinating mechanism to coordinate how they all flourish. And so law comes to get its justification by being the social instrument that helps people flourish in a community. But that justification sets an end for law too. And that justification creates the elements of Thomas's definition of law. So, law has a teleological justification. The end of law is to help people prosper together in community, and a directive that helps people prosper together, all as equal beings is a just law. And that tendency toward justice is what Thomas gets at when he talks about law being an ordinance directed to the common good, the second element about the common good. But since these ordinances aren't going to work very well, unless people know who can make them and know what they are, law also needs requirements to make clear, Some people can make law for the whole community, and the laws have to be made in a way that the subjects of the law have to be given notice. And so the justification that teleological end of the law requires that law be made by somebody in due care, and that they be made in a way that they're promulgated for the benefit of the subjects. PUBLIUS: Do Natural Law scholars all agree on the four elements of law proposed by Aquinas? Does anyone emphasize the importance of one element over another? For instance, can you talk about how William Blackstone approached law? Would he have agreed with all parts of Aquinas’ definition? ERIC CLAEYS: So laws can come in different types and remember again, that for Thomas, a law is an ordinance of reason directed to the common good, made by the community or people in due care of it, and they're promulgated. And remember again, that not every version, every instance of law's going to satisfy all those elements perfectly. But that definition covers a lot of different things. It covers a statute's clearly a law: it's promulgated, it's made by a legislature in care of the community. But, that definition also covers some things that might not seem laws in the way that a statute does. So think of a series of decisions by a set of judges, in one sense, that you have people in due care of the community, the judges, and you have their decisions, they're promulgated. But someone has to piece together the rules of decision that are applied before one really sees what the " effective law " is. And there are even more soft and debatable ways that law can be made, and one example that would be custom. So, imagine that a group of people all start behaving in a certain way. There's an intersection and everybody knows that at this intersection, people make a left turn in a specific way, even if there aren't any safety rules that tell people that. If everybody started behaving that way, that is in a sense law; one has to look at the practice to be sure, but assume that the people are all making these turns in a certain way because they all have this intuition, this will all help them get where they want to go. That is a directive that contributes to the common good of all the people when they're trying to travel, and it's made by them in community in that they're all following this custom. But is it promulgated or not? It is and it isn't. It is in the sense that if everybody kind of intuits that you do this, it's promulgated. Blackstone deserves a lot of respect because he tried to restate basic principles of English law in a way that was more systematic than any lawyer in the English tradition had done to that point, and Blackstone subscribed to principles of Natural Law. He thought that people are entitled to absolute moral rights. And he wrote about law from that perspective. And Blackstone restated English law, and he added a lot of window- dressing in his commentaries on the laws of England, explaining that these natural laws secured absolute rights, and he made some observations about law along the way. Blackstone defined law to be a rule made by the magistrate prescribing what is right and prohibiting what is wrong. Blackstone's definition had two problems. One is that it was a little ambiguous or wasn't maybe as systematic as it should have been. Because Blackstone said that a law consisted of a rule prescribed by the magistrate, that might make it seem as if something like a custom is not really law. Because he said a law, requires or encourages what's right and prohibits what's wrong, he raised doubts about whether law that's not very just is the law at all. Blackstone tended to hyperbole. He tended to exaggerate with big rhetorical flourishes, and so there are other passages where he suggested that if something lacks justice, it can have no validity. If one takes together his definition of law and passages saying that rules of law that are not consistent with the natural law have no validity, he could reasonably be read as saying that a law that's unjust has no validity whatsoever for legal purposes. PUBLIUS: Did William Blackstone offer his own definition of law? Why did he write the “Commentaries on the Laws of England”? ERIC CLAEYS: Blackstone's discussion of law is hard to follow or, or hard to understand through, and I think that comes back to the fact that Blackstone was doing a few different things in his commentaries, and those were different on this particular point. The most important practical function of the commentaries was to provide a resource to English lawyers in the late 18th century about what the law was. The common law was spread out over a lot of different fields, and there weren't that many treatises that were trying to take a 30,000 foot view of the law. Blackstone was also trying to reconcile the common law in all the grubby details of it with the natural law tradition. There were a lot of different traditions in the Catholic, like the Scholastics, and then some Protestant natural law thinkers. Blackstone didn't know a lot of the theorists in that tradition, he wasn't as sophisticated a philosopher as he was a lawyer. So Blackstone relied on principles of natural law, and added them to his commentaries, but he didn't treat the natural law issues and philosophy in his commentaries as systematically as a really careful theologian or philosopher would have. And again, Blackstone tended towards being hyperbolic.Blackstone was a lawyer. He focused primarily on expounding on what the law of England was. He took for granted that principles of law were justified by natural law. He assumed that all his readers agreed, and he didn't spend a lot of time specifying exactly what he meant by natural law, or anticipating criticisms that might be raised about the claims he assumed about natural law. This might not have been a weakness of Blackstone in the 1770s when he wrote his commentaries, but things were changing in England very rapidly among the elite, among intellectuals in England, natural law was falling out of fashion. Academics were coming to the fore. Utilitarian theorists were coming to the fore, and these utilitarians were skeptical of the entire natural law tradition, and Utilitarians would expect somebody to be able to defend natural law against the kinds of objections that Utilitarians would raise. Blackstone was not interested in defending natural law on philosophical grounds systematically; he didn't anticipate any of the objections that were gonna come in the next 30 years. PUBLIUS: Why does Blackstone still matter? How does his jurisprudence, if you can say that he had one, line up with modern or traditional jurisprudential scholarship? ERIC CLAEYS: I'd say Blackstone was a natural lawyer. He just wasn't a very systematic natural lawyer, and I guess I'd say also Blackstone was first and foremost a lawyer and only second a theorist. He subscribed to Principles of Natural Law, but he was more interested in what the law was in England, and so he didn't treat systematically a lot of tougher philosophical questions about what law is and what law's limits are as an analytical matter. Blackstone's still read for two main reasons. Blackstone, as a lawyer, he did more than anybody else to bring together all the messy details of English common law and put it in one unified place. He wrote four volumes on English law; those went deep onto some odd subjects and skimped on some other subjects, but still they covered basic rights to person, property, what we now know as the basic torts and the basic crimes, and it was a good starting point to have a system of law in one place. Also, Blackstone restated the common sense of a lot of Englishmen who understood that law is an institution securing basic, absolute rights, consistent with the natural law. And even if he wasn't a profound natural law theorist in the ranks of someone like an Aquinas, he still restated a commonsensical understanding of law and the way the law carries out basic principles of natural law. And he portrayed the law in his commentaries that way. His commentaries are organized around basic, absolute rights. So, volume one of the commentary assumes that people have absolute rights in their person, and it's going through the basic rights people have in their persons. And then, book two assumes that there's an absolute right to property and it's studying the right to property. And then these rights impose duties on others, and when other people breach these duties, those are wrongs. And Book Three then focuses on the civil wrongs, all the Torts and breaches of contract by which people do not respect other people's valid legal rights. And then Book Four talks about the public wrongs, the crimes, when somebody violates someone else's rights in a way that scandalizes and scares the community, and requires the community then to use force to bring the wrongdoer into line. So Blackstone gives a money quote definition of law and when he does, he defines municipal law as a rule of civil conduct, prescribed by the supreme power, in a state commanding what is right, and prohibiting what is wrong. And that definition sounds clear, and it sounds a little like what Thomas says. There are some minor differences in ambiguity in it. When Blackstone talks about a rule of civil conduct, the idea of a rule seems parallel to what Thomas talks about when he defines laws being an ordinance of reason. When Blackstone talks about a law being defined by the supreme power and state, that's something similar to what Thomas gets at when he talks about a law being made by the community or someone in due care of the community. And when Blackstone talks about the law commanding what's right or prohibiting what's wrong, that's parallel to what Thomas talks about when a law is an ordinance of reason directed toward the common good. The ambiguity then is, is this a definition like a definition for triangles, or a definition for something like a chair? A definition of a triangle would tell you that anything that does not have three sides and three angles is not a triangle. A definition of a chair can only ever be kind of a central case definition. There are lots of different things that people could sit on that might be ideal chairs and might not be chairs. And Thomas, when he defines law to be something that has an essence, and then there are some outside versions of laws that are laws by participation. Thomas makes clear that he thinks that law is something that has a central case and then borderline cases. Blackstone doesn't make clear whether his definition is a one size fits all definition, and if it's a one size fits all definition, then something that doesn't fit all the elements is just not a law. It's not clear what Blackstone meant when he said, no human laws are of any validity contrary to this. Maybe Blackstone was indulging in some rhetorical license, and if he was, he's probably saying something similar to what Thomas says when Thomas says that Laws are things that are directed to the common good. So then if a directive is unjust, it might be a law in the sense that it's been stamped as a law by a legislature, and it's obeyed as law by citizens, but it's not an ideal law because it's grossly unjust in some way. If Blackstone's being literal, not engaging in rhetorical license, then if a directive is not just, then it follows automatically that the directive cannot be a law, even if people recognize it as a law and obey it as a law in their ordinary affairs. NARRATOR: Thank you for listening to this episode of the No. 86 Lecture series on Jurisprudence. The spirit of debate of our Founding Fathers animates all of the No. 86 content, encouraging discussion and critical reflection relative to how each subject is widely understood and taught in law schools and among law students. Subscribe to the No. 86 Lecture series on your favorite podcast platform to have each episode delivered the moment it’s released. You can also go to fedsoc.org/no86 for lectures and videos on Federalism, Separation of Powers, the Judiciary and more. Thanks for listening. See you in class! TRANSCRIPT - VERBATIM FOR YOUTUBE Thanks for joining this episode of the No. 86 lecture series, where we discuss classical and modern Jurisprudence. Today’s episode features Eric Claeys, Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. In his scholarship, he studies theories of natural law and natural rights and their implications in property law. Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Torts, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. As always, the Federalist Society takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues; all expressions of opinion are those of the speaker. Professor Claeys, what is “natural” about law? Aren’t most laws artificial constructs by a particular community? So in the phrase natural law, natural means a few different things at once. One is that a principle or an idea is natural if somebody can use his or her own rational faculties to understand it without help from any other source, including any other higher source. and a principle's also natural if it's a principle about the way people ought to deal with each other. A principle's natural if it's something that you can see or identify coming out of human nature. A principle's also natural if it's something that has a validity, whether or not a community has said: this is part of what we do. So a community can say we have a traffic law, and that traffic law is a convention. The traffic law by itself doesn't make it so that people have rights to travel and rights to be safe. The speed limit sets the community's estimate, like what speed limit's going to secure those rights, but the rights are valid whether or not the community had respected them at all with its own traffic law. Natural law was clearly understood as a distinct discipline by the Middle Ages with a lot of theologians and philosophers in the Catholic tradition. The stoics during the Roman Empire, they worked out the principles that were maybe the first settled understanding of natural law. law ,and then Cicero did similar work. And so those are probably the two sources where natural law first kind of congealed and became a distinct way of thinking, and then Catholic Thinkers appropriated what the stoics and Cicero taught and developed a systematic philosophy out of it. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a work called The Summa Theologica, and it's a systematic treatment of theology, and it treats a lot of different parts of human life in the rubric of theology. And one of the many topics in human life that Thomas talks about is law. And Thomas offers there a definition of law, and that definition's kind of taken as the paradigm definition of law from a natural law point of view. And in Thomas's view, a law has four different features: a law consists of an ordinance of reason, and it's an ordinance of reason directed to the common good, it's made by the community or someone in due care of the community, and the ordinance has been promulgated. And there's one last feature that's not an element of his definition, but it's a way of understanding what this definition does. Thomas, says that this definition applies to essential cases of law, what we might call central cases of law, not to what he calls participative understandings of law, what we might call borderline understandings of law. So, he thinks that the ideal law is an ordinance of reason directed at the common good, made by the community or someone in due care of it, and it's promulgated, and he understands that there can be borderline laws that have some, but not all these features. Because Aquinas defines law by an essential case, he admits that there are laws that can be borderline laws, and he admits for several different kinds of borderline laws. One example would be: imagine a law that is just, it's ordered toward the common good, but the people in charge have done a bad job of posting notice of it. So that would be a law that is an ordinance of reason, directed to the common good. It's been made by the right people, but if they haven't posted it clearly, it's not so well promulgated. So it's law in three of the four senses, but it's not law in the fourth sense. More controversially, what about a law that's grossly unjust? So, like an order by the Nazi government to kill Jews. It's made by the people in due care of the community and it's been promulgated, but it's not for the common good of the community because it's directing the extermination of some people in the community, and there's no just basis for doing that. So, about that kind of law to Thomas's account would say, laws that are not just are gonna seem strange, or imperfect, or incomplete, because they have some of the four features of law, but they're not directed toward the common good. And some laws might be laws that people kind of have knots in their stomach about or queasy feelings about, but they know: yeah, they're still laws. But then some laws are so blatantly unjust, like that extermination order, that they're not law at all. And Thomas's definition of law leaves it ambiguous how unjust a law needs to be before it ceases to be law in any case whatsoever. Thomas's account of law, a teleological account. Teleology means the idea that some object has an end, and there are lots of objects that we recognize readily have ends. The simplest examples would be living things that don't have reason. Seeds have the end of growing into trees. Animals have the end of breeding, procreating, and then doing certain things that we associate with those animals. And then another example of things that uncontroversially ends would be simple tools. A paper clip is an object with an end. It has the end of holding together paper. And when, objects have ends like this, the end gives somebody who is working with the object a built in standard to know whether you're dealing with an excellent version of the object, an inferior version of the object, or something that even if someone claims it's an instance of the object, it's just a preposterous ludicrous example of the object. How does this apply to society or individual people? Now that same way of thinking can apply to human life too. It does apply with a lot more controversy. But if you take for granted or you stipulate that this other approach applies to human life, then people have ends. And in the natural law tradition, people have the end of becoming happy or flourishing people. And then in community, people can prosper collectively too. If people are going to prosper collectively, they need some central authority to create rules of the road for them all to know what they have to do in relation to each other, and so in an account of natural law, people need to flourish, people have the end of flourishing, people since they're social creatures should flourish together. But if they're going to flourish together, there needs to be some coordinating mechanism to coordinate how they all flourish. And so law comes to get its justification by being the social instrument that helps people flourish in a community. But that justification sets an end for law too. And that justification creates the elements of Thomas's definition of law. So, law has a teleological justification. The end of law is to help people prosper together in community, and a directive that helps people prosper together, all as equal beings is a just law. And that tendency toward justice is what Thomas gets at when he talks about law being an ordinance directed to the common good, the second element about the common good. But since these ordinances aren't going to work very well, unless people know who can make them and know what they are, law also needs requirements to make clear, Some people can make law for the whole community, and the laws have to be made in a way that the subjects of the law have to be given notice. And so the justification that teleological end of the law requires that law be made by somebody in due care, and that they be made in a way that they're promulgated for the benefit of the subjects. Do Natural Law scholars all agree on the four elements of law proposed by Aquinas? Does anyone emphasize the importance of one element over another? For instance, can you talk about how William Blackstone approached law? Would he have agreed with all parts of Aquinas’ definition? So laws can come in different types and remember again, that for Thomas, a law is an ordinance of reason directed to the common good, made by the community or people in due care of it, and they're promulgated. And remember again, that not every version, every instance of law's going to satisfy all those elements perfectly. But that definition covers a lot of different things. It covers a statute's clearly a law: it's promulgated, it's made by a legislature in care of the community. But, that definition also covers some things that might not seem laws in the way that a statute does. So think of a series of decisions by a set of judges, in one sense, that you have people in due care of the community, the judges, and you have their decisions, they're promulgated. But someone has to piece together the rules of decision that are applied before one really sees what the " effective law " is. And there are even more soft and debatable ways that law can be made, and one example that would be custom. So, imagine that a group of people all start behaving in a certain way. There's an intersection and everybody knows that at this intersection, people make a left turn in a specific way, even if there aren't any safety rules that tell people that. If everybody started behaving that way, that is in a sense law; one has to look at the practice to be sure, but assume that the people are all making these turns in a certain way because they all have this intuition, this will all help them get where they want to go. That is a directive that contributes to the common good of all the people when they're trying to travel, and it's made by them in community in that they're all following this custom. But is it promulgated or not? It is and it isn't. It is in the sense that if everybody kind of intuits that you do this, it's promulgated. Blackstone deserves a lot of respect because he tried to restate basic principles of English law in a way that was more systematic than any lawyer in the English tradition had done to that point, and Blackstone subscribed to principles of Natural Law. He thought that people are entitled to absolute moral rights. And he wrote about law from that perspective. And Blackstone restated English law, and he added a lot of window- dressing in his commentaries on the laws of England, explaining that these natural laws secured absolute rights, and he made some observations about law along the way. Blackstone defined law to be a rule made by the magistrate prescribing what is right and prohibiting what is wrong. Blackstone's definition had two problems. One is that it was a little ambiguous or wasn't maybe as systematic as it should have been. Because Blackstone said that a law consisted of a rule prescribed by the magistrate, that might make it seem as if something like a custom is not really law. Because he said a law, requires or encourages what's right and prohibits what's wrong, he raised doubts about whether law that's not very just is the law at all. Blackstone tended to hyperbole. He tended to exaggerate with big rhetorical flourishes, and so there are other passages where he suggested that if something lacks justice, it can have no validity. If one takes together his definition of law and passages saying that rules of law that are not consistent with the natural law have no validity, he could reasonably be read as saying that a law that's unjust has no validity whatsoever for legal purposes. Did William Blackstone offer his own definition of law? Why did he write the “Commentaries on the Laws of England”? Blackstone's discussion of law is hard to follow or, or hard to understand through, and I think that comes back to the fact that Blackstone was doing a few different things in his commentaries, and those were different on this particular point. The most important practical function of the commentaries was to provide a resource to English lawyers in the late 18th century about what the law was. The common law was spread out over a lot of different fields, and there weren't that many treatises that were trying to take a 30,000 foot view of the law. Blackstone was also trying to reconcile the common law in all the grubby details of it with the natural law tradition. There were a lot of different traditions in the Catholic, like the Scholastics, and then some Protestant natural law thinkers. Blackstone didn't know a lot of the theorists in that tradition, he wasn't as sophisticated a philosopher as he was a lawyer. So Blackstone relied on principles of natural law, and added them to his commentaries, but he didn't treat the natural law issues and philosophy in his commentaries as systematically as a really careful theologian or philosopher would have. And again, Blackstone tended towards being hyperbolic.Blackstone was a lawyer. He focused primarily on expounding on what the law of England was. He took for granted that principles of law were justified by natural law. He assumed that all his readers agreed, and he didn't spend a lot of time specifying exactly what he meant by natural law, or anticipating criticisms that might be raised about the claims he assumed about natural law. This might not have been a weakness of Blackstone in the 1770s when he wrote his commentaries, but things were changing in England very rapidly among the elite, among intellectuals in England, natural law was falling out of fashion. Academics were coming to the fore. Utilitarian theorists were coming to the fore, and these utilitarians were skeptical of the entire natural law tradition, and Utilitarians would expect somebody to be able to defend natural law against the kinds of objections that Utilitarians would raise. Blackstone was not interested in defending natural law on philosophical grounds systematically; he didn't anticipate any of the objections that were gonna come in the next 30 years. Why does Blackstone still matter? How does his jurisprudence, if you can say that he had one, line up with modern or traditional jurisprudential scholarship? I'd say Blackstone was a natural lawyer. He just wasn't a very systematic natural lawyer, and I guess I'd say also Blackstone was first and foremost a lawyer and only second a theorist. He subscribed to Principles of Natural Law, but he was more interested in what the law was in England, and so he didn't treat systematically a lot of tougher philosophical questions about what law is and what law's limits are as an analytical matter. Blackstone's still read for two main reasons. Blackstone, as a lawyer, he did more than anybody else to bring together all the messy details of English common law and put it in one unified place. He wrote four volumes on English law; those went deep onto some odd subjects and skimped on some other subjects, but still they covered basic rights to person, property, what we now know as the basic torts and the basic crimes, and it was a good starting point to have a system of law in one place. Also, Blackstone restated the common sense of a lot of Englishmen who understood that law is an institution securing basic, absolute rights, consistent with the natural law. And even if he wasn't a profound natural law theorist in the ranks of someone like an Aquinas, he still restated a commonsensical understanding of law and the way the law carries out basic principles of natural law. And he portrayed the law in his commentaries that way. His commentaries are organized around basic, absolute rights. So, volume one of the commentary assumes that people have absolute rights in their person, and it's going through the basic rights people have in their persons. And then, book two assumes that there's an absolute right to property and it's studying the right to property. And then these rights impose duties on others, and when other people breach these duties, those are wrongs. And Book Three then focuses on the civil wrongs, all the Torts and breaches of contract by which people do not respect other people's valid legal rights. And then Book Four talks about the public wrongs, the crimes, when somebody violates someone else's rights in a way that scandalizes and scares the community, and requires the community then to use force to bring the wrongdoer into line. So Blackstone gives a money quote definition of law and when he does, he defines municipal law as a rule of civil conduct, prescribed by the supreme power, in a state commanding what is right, and prohibiting what is wrong. And that definition sounds clear, and it sounds a little like what Thomas says. There are some minor differences in ambiguity in it. When Blackstone talks about a rule of civil conduct, the idea of a rule seems parallel to what Thomas talks about when he defines laws being an ordinance of reason. When Blackstone talks about a law being defined by the supreme power and state, that's something similar to what Thomas gets at when he talks about a law being made by the community or someone in due care of the community. And when Blackstone talks about the law commanding what's right or prohibiting what's wrong, that's parallel to what Thomas talks about when a law is an ordinance of reason directed toward the common good. The ambiguity then is, is this a definition like a definition for triangles, or a definition for something like a chair? A definition of a triangle would tell you that anything that does not have three sides and three angles is not a triangle. A definition of a chair can only ever be kind of a central case definition. There are lots of different things that people could sit on that might be ideal chairs and might not be chairs. And Thomas, when he defines law to be something that has an essence, and then there are some outside versions of laws that are laws by participation. Thomas makes clear that he thinks that law is something that has a central case and then borderline cases. Blackstone doesn't make clear whether his definition is a one size fits all definition, and if it's a one size fits all definition, then something that doesn't fit all the elements is just not a law. It's not clear what Blackstone meant when he said, no human laws are of any validity contrary to this. Maybe Blackstone was indulging in some rhetorical license, and if he was, he's probably saying something similar to what Thomas says when Thomas says that Laws are things that are directed to the common good. So then if a directive is unjust, it might be a law in the sense that it's been stamped as a law by a legislature, and it's obeyed as law by citizens, but it's not an ideal law because it's grossly unjust in some way. If Blackstone's being literal, not engaging in rhetorical license, then if a directive is not just, then it follows automatically that the directive cannot be a law, even if people recognize it as a law and obey it as a law in their ordinary affairs. 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