It has more than once been observed that funeral orations for the natural law have always been premature. The implication that the concept has a continuing vitality, giving the lie to the prophets of its doom, is justification for yet another book on a subject, now as much as ever in the two and a half millenia of its history a matter of controversy. The history of the natural law has often been written -or at least the history of the concept in the Western European Greco 2 Roman tradition. This study does not claim to be a history, although its method is primarily historical and its...