Natural law
and domestic government
Transformative
legal theory in Early Modern Europe
Leuven – 27-28 April 2023
The Early Modern natural law tradition as received
from Antiquity and the Middle Ages was in many senses a bridging paradigm. While
natural law had been a significant subject of debate among late-medieval
theologians, civilians and canonists, it gained a far more central role in
legal theory and scholarship from the sixteenth century onwards, in the
writings of theologians and jurists alike. As natural law discourse developed
over its Early Modern lifespan, it increasingly started to acquire the
trappings of a legal theory – underpinning concrete legal notions and offering
a paradigm which could be applied to a variety of legal domains and facts. By
the early seventeenth century, it had become a major vehicle for conceptions,
principles and institutions of law, relating to both private transactions and
public governance.
This emergence of natural law as legal theory
coincided with the emergence of one legal field to which it would be readily
applied; the sphere of the state or the domain of domestic public law. In
another sense, it was precisely the growing autonomy and importance of public
law and the need for a legal theory underpinning it (as the classic Roman law
texts provided insufficient textual support and canon law lost its universality),
which fed the rise of legal natural law thinking. This intimate link between natural
law and the sphere of domestic governance is made manifest especially in the
first modern theories of the polity, where i.a. the articulation of the idea of
a state of nature is closely tied together with the Catholic notion of natural
rights. It is around this link and its two components that this two-day conference
revolves.
We hence especially welcome contributions dealing with
the role of natural law in the development of domestic public law in the 16th
and 17th centuries (with the possibility to accommodate papers on
Early Modern subjects set in the 18th century, before 1789).
Subjects of private law with a meaningful link to questions of domestic
governance within the outlined period are also welcomed. After all, e.g. the
all-important natural law notion of private property was at least in part
developed as a premise for theories of the state. Likewise, contributions
dealing with the development of domestic public law as a scientific discipline
in general will also be considered.
Potential
participants are to send in a summary of the proposed paper (200-400 words) to naturallawconference@kuleuven.be by 1 June,
2022, also including their academic affiliation and a brief cv (max. 200
words). A maximum of twenty
participants will be chosen from among the applicants by the selection
committee. Full manuscripts will be required by the start of the conference.
The contributions of the participants will, after a peer-reviewing process, be published
as a collection volume at an internationally reputed publishing house. Professors Annabel Brett (University
of Cambridge) and Marie Seong-Hak Kim (St. Cloud State University) will deliver
the keynote addresses.
The conference organisers,
Wouter Druwé,
Randall Lesaffer and Geert Sluijs
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