How to Think About Law

Overarching theme: Law is the mediator between divine and human, reason and will, individual and community.

Key concepts to cover:

• Introduce basic categories of eternal, natural, divine, and human law.
• Distinguish between “purely human” and “partly human” law and highlight the great practical significance of this distinction.
• Law must be an ordinance of reason, an ordering toward the common good.
• Law is also an act of will, binding to some extent even if unreasonable.
• Clarifying the sense in which “an unjust law is not law”
• Law has both divine and human authority; law as an act of corporate promise-making
• Law both restrains the individual for the sake of the community and restrains the community for the sake of the individual
• The scope over which law has authority (law not separable from morality or religion)