| In this dissertation, I examine the origins of natural law thinking and argue for the emergence of a normative concept of law in Greek oratory and philosophy. By "natural law," I refer broadly to the set of views positing the existence of legal norms or principles that are distinct from and superior to positive, legislated laws.;To this end, the dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is devoted to forensic oratory. It aims to show that Athenian litigants frequently constructed the meaning of statutory provisions in accordance with their conceptions of what the law ought to state, grounding their interpretations in various structural, policy-based, or moral principles to which the law, they argue, is subject. Chapter Two proceeds to analyze Plato's Laws and argues that the Athenian Stranger puts forth a complex thesis for the natural authority of law, conceived as reason, in Book III (690b-c). Characterized as the most important claim to political power, this thesis asserts that the rule of genuine law is in accordance with human nature, in particular the structure of psychological motivations presented in the dialogue. Chapter Three is concerned with Book I of Aristotle's Politics, especially its account of the development of human communities and the argument for the naturalness of the city in Politics I.2, concluding that both lay important groundwork for Aristotle's mature natural law theory in Book III of the Politics, which forms the subject of Chapter Four. Focused on illuminating a complex argument about distributive justice in Politics III.9, Chapter Four evaluates Aristotle's claim that genuine law both must satisfy the normative requirement of being concerned with virtue and should be generally sovereign in city-states. Chapter Five, lastly, is an excursion into Aristotle's interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone in the Rhetoric: it contends that Aristotle's intriguing reading of the tragedy is informed by both his idiosyncratic poetic theory and his discussions of natural law and justice in the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics.;Taken together, the dissertation asks the following set of questions. First, given (positive) law, what criteria ground one's interpretation of the statutory language? Chapter One addresses this issue and argues that Athenian litigants frequently constructed the meaning of law (e.g., the impeachment law) with normative rather than merely linguistic arguments. Second, given a particular interpretation of the law and a particular conception of the legal system, what role does law play in the political community? Both Chapters Two (which analyzes the Athenian Stranger's view that the rule of law is in accordance with human nature) and Four (which examines the Politics ' claim that law should be sovereign in a state) address this question. Third, given a lawcode, what considerations justify the arrangement of the entire constitutional or legal system? This is the main concern of Chapter Four, which explores Aristotle's complex thesis in Politics III.9 that both the state and the law must be oriented towards virtue. Chapter Two touches on this topic as well given the Laws' insistence that genuine law must aim at happiness and virtue.;These three jurisprudential questions - concerning the interpretation, the authority or enforcement, and the moral foundation of law, respectively - are interconnected. How one answers the moral foundation question, for example, might influence the answer to the enforcement question (e.g., the position that law must be attentive to virtue might incline one to commit to the thesis that law should also hold primary authority in a state). Similarly, the thesis that an authority other than law (e.g., human rulers) should be sovereign in a political community might influence one's positions on how law should be interpreted. The dissertation also explores the interconnections among the questions it asks, in the process elucidating a fascinating interplay among literary, philosophical, and rhetorical texts. |
