Commentary
When government enacts legislation that undermines even our most elementary rights, one might be inclined to inquiry whether, in order to be valid, positive laws may have to conform to certain objective standards of justice and morality.
Some lawyers have traditionally answered this in the affirmative, arguing for objective standards which are accessible to everyone by virtue of our rational capacities. Others have gone even further by attributing the authorship of these higher standards directly to God—in particular, a Christian incarnation of God.
Whatever one makes of these arguments, the belief in the existence of higher laws can be traced to the ancient Greeks, through Christian medieval writers, and down to modern times….