Hanina and Yemima Ben-Menahem

The Rule of Law: Natural, Human, and Divine

In this paper we compare two different contexts – the legal and the scientific – in which the concept of law is prominent. We argue that in the early modern period the acute philosophical awareness of the difficulties surrounding the concept of law in the scientific context, and the various responses to these difficulties, are rooted in an earlier tradition of jurisprudential concerns over the concept of natural law in its legal sense. We seek to show, further, that each of the various philosophical accounts of the concept of natural law (in both of its senses) is embedded in a metaphysical and theological context, so that different visions of God yield different accounts of the meaning of natural law in science as well as legal theory.

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Hanina Ben-Menahem, Professor of Law, the Hebrew University, works in Jurisprudence, the Philosophy of Law, and the foundations of Talmudic Law. Among his books (as author or editor): Nietzsche on the Law (Hebrew, Magnes, 2021); Controversy in Jewish Law, volumes I–III (with S. Wosner and N. Hecht, Hebrew, Institute for research in Jewish Law 1991–2002); Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law: Governed by Men, Not by Rules (Harwood academic publishers, 1991).

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Yemima Ben-Menahem, Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University, works in the Philosophy of Science. Among her books (as author or editor): Conventionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Causation in Science (Princeton University Press, 2018); Rethinking the Concept of Law of Nature (Springer, 2022).