The Case against the Marriage of Natural Law and Natural Rights, by Tracey Rowland:

p. 75 [about the] genealogy of the natural rights doctrine. Here there are at least six different accounts of the first appearance of natural rights. There is: (i) the position of Leo Strauss that a full-blown theory of natural rights begins with Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century;4 (ii) the position associated with the early work of Richard Tuck that it begins with the fifteenth-century Conciliar movement, particularly the work of Jean Gerson (1363–1429);5 (iii) the reading of Michel Villey (1914–1988),6 followed by John Milbank, that the genesis of natural rights is to be found in the fourteenth century with the mediaeval Franciscan movement, especially the thought of William of Ockham (1287–1347);7 (iv) the judgement of Finnis that a version of natural right can be found in the works of St Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274);8 (v) the position of Brian Tierney and Charles Reid, Jr, that the origins may be found in the publications of twelfth-century canonists;9 and (vi) the Wolterstorff thesis that natural rights can be found embedded in the Bible.10 Wolterstorff has been described as a ‘Whig Calvinist’ whose project is analogous to that of the ‘Whig Thomism’ of Maritain and Finnis insofar as he seeks to uncover a Christian foundation for the natural right tradition. However, since Wolterstorff locates the foundation in the Bible, not in a Christian appropriation of Stoic philosophy, in order to effect his Liberal-Calvinist alliance. he does not need a ‘marriage’ but a simple ‘baptism’ of modern natural right in the name of his biblical natural right.

3. Douglas Kries, ‘Leo Strauss’s Critique of Modern Political Philosophy and Ernest Fortin’s Critique of Modern “Catholic Social Teaching”’, in Geoffrey Vaughan (ed.), Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 116.

4 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

5 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1979).

6 Michel Villey, Critique de la pensée juridique moderne: Douze autres essais. Réimpression de l’édition de 1976 (Paris: Dalloz, 2009); La droit et les droits de l’homme (Paris: PUF, 2014).

7 John Milbank, ‘Against Human Rights: Liberty in the Western Tradition’, in Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty (eds.), The Meaning of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 39.

8 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. VIII; John Finnis,

Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. V.

9 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1997); Charles Reid Jr., ‘Medieval Origins of the Western Natural Rights Tradition’ (1998) 83(2) Cornell Law Review 437.

10 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).