Human Goods and Human Rights Law: Two Modes of Derivation from Natural Law

Abstract

The category of ‘human rights law’ is sometimes limited to bills and charters of rights on the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the case law of courts interpreting and applying these legal measures. This chapter, forthcoming in The Cambridge Handbook of Natural Law and Human Rights (Tom Angier, Iain Benson, and Mark Retter, eds, Cambridge University Press), argues that the measures that realise human rights in the law are the everyday, unremarkable measures that make up the full corpus of legal materials directing what may, must, and must not be done. The argument explores how all sound positive law finds its source in human goods through one of two modes of derivation: deduction or specification. These are the same two modes of positive law’s derivation from natural law, for the reach of human rights law is more or less coextensive with the reach of positive law and the human goods from which are derived human rights law are the same human goods from which are derived natural law’s practical principles and precepts.