From Nature to Biology

In this chapter we historicize key debates around law and nature and engage with legal theory and the scholarship emerging from the history of natural law theory, evolutionary jurisprudence, sociology of law, philosophy of law, feminist jurisprudence, and legal pluralism. Transformations in thinking around law, nature, and biology were interrupted by the events of World War II. The eugenic sociobiology that informed the Holocaust and the legal positivist formalization of any law independent from its content led to a double crisis: namely the law’s lack of inherent morality and the use of science for physical extermination. The return of classical natural law in the form of a universal human rights regime declared human equality absolute. It established a new foundational moral framework for law that resulted in a less visible entanglement of law and biology in subsequent decades.