is the guest of the Law & Philosophy Program today, and a 3-hour seminar on some chapters from his book manuscript on Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics will be beginning shortly, followed by a talk in the Philosophy Department (which means not much new posting today).
An awful lot is written about natural law theory, but most of it is philosophically pretty feeble (and far too dependent on theological commitments which most writers just take for granted). The main contemporary exceptions have been John Finnis; then David Brink's and Michael Moore's efforts to exploit the new theory of reference to defend some natural law theses (though for a review of the now-standard doubts about this effort, see here); and now Murphy's work, which is extremely interesting and challenging philosophically, and moves beyond Finnis and Brink/Moore in novel ways. Look for his "state of the art" essay on natural law theory forthcoming in Legal Theory later this fall, and see also his own contribution on natural law as a tradition in ethics here.
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