The Natural Law Tradition and International Law

If natural law is the answer, what is the problem in international law? The paper starts to grapple with the question of what is at stake in apparent disagreements between current self described natural law theorists regarding international law (John Finnis, John Tasioulas, Dworkin) and those who claim to dismiss natural law - be it some sort of self described 'positivists' or those using other labels to describe their position (this community may include Raz). One of the interesting aspects of this question is that the answer seems to have varied over time – which may be one reason for the changing contents and emphasis of ‘natural law’ over the centuries. The relevant ‘problems’ of international law today is also a contested list: it may include the turn toward renationalization of authority due in part to wide spread fears that international law and international courts are either bad solutions or addressing non-existent problems or both; or that they make some matters of domestic distributive justice worse; fears of unconstrained powers of judges; fragmentation allegedly causing lack of legal certainty; widespread risks of noncompliance; contested multilateralism. Other ‘problems’ may be how to understand and use the 'non-state-consent-based' sources of international law – customary international law, general principles; how to address issues of normatively problematic non-signing of 'morally obligatory treaties' that clearly contribute to provide indisputable global public goods? What sort of normative significance to grant (non)consent to treaties by non-democratic states? The ‘problems’ may also include interpretations and assessments of various salient judgments by international courts e.g. the the role of appeals in the Lotus case to the role of state consent; the use in the North Sea Continental Shelf case of 'equitable principles’, etc.