Natural Law; or The Science of Justice
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice is Lysander Spooner’s 1882 essay — the most radical use of the natural-law tradition in this corpus, turning natural justice directly against the legitimacy of legislation itself.
Justice as a Science
Spooner opens by defining the subject with deliberate precision: “The science of mine and thine — the science of justice — is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Justice is not a matter of opinion, sentiment, or majority will but a natural, exact, and immutable science — knowable, like any science, by reason, and binding on everyone.
The conditions of justice reduce to two: each person must do what justice requires (pay debts, return what is owed, make reparation for harms) and abstain from what justice forbids (theft, robbery, arson, murder). This is recognizably the libertarian nonaggression core, derived directly from a natural-rights premise.
Legislation as Crime
From the claim that justice is a complete natural science, Spooner draws the conclusion the essay is famous for: since natural justice already fixes everyone’s rights, “all human legislation” — every command of a legislature purporting to create obligations beyond natural justice — is “an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime.” Legislators who claim authority to invent rights and duties are simply asserting a power to override justice, which no one can rightfully possess. Government’s only legitimate function is to discover and enforce the natural law, never to make law.
This is the natural-law tradition pushed to its individualist-anarchist limit: where Locke used natural rights to limit government, Spooner uses them to delegitimize the legislative state as such. It is of a piece with his better-known No Treason (the Constitution has no authority over anyone who did not personally consent).
Place in This Wiki
Spooner is the bridge between the classical natural-law canon and modern American libertarianism. His “science of justice” anticipates Rothbard’s natural-rights ethics and the nonaggression principle, and his rejection of legislation prefigures the anti-statism of market anarchism. Rothbard explicitly revived Spooner; the wiki already holds the Spooner material in Let’s Abolish Government.
See Also
- Lysander Spooner - author reference
- Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition this essay radicalizes
- Second Treatise of Government - Locke’s limited-government use of the same natural rights
- The Ethics of Liberty - Rothbard’s natural-rights ethics that revives Spooner
- Let’s Abolish Government - the existing Spooner collection in this wiki
- Market Anarchism and Private Law - Concept article on non-state courts, protection, insurance, and title systems in the current libertarian book set.
Sources
- Spooner, Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (Full Text) - Part First (the science of justice; the two conditions; legislation as usurpation), 1882