Unjust Law Is No Law At All Essay

Christian theologian and philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo once wrote “lex iniusta non est lex”, which his Latin for “an unjust law is no law at all”. This idea is one of the fundamental tenets of natural law theory and has been echoed not only by other theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, but frequently in philosophical, legal and civic discourse. In The Concept of Law, H.L.A Hart explores the relationship between justice, morality, and the law. Noting that “justice should have a most prominent place in the criticism of legal arrangements,” (Hart 157) Hart seeks to illustrate that “it is a distinct segment of morality, and that laws and the administration of laws may have or lack excellences of certain kinds” (Hart 157). To demonstrate

The assertion that capacity is a reasonable basis for legal discrimination has been challenged by those who believe that such discrimination can be unjust to those with mental disabilities. In John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, the agreement that forms the basis of society is “restricted to members who would be “fully-cooperating” over the course of their adult lives” (Rawls 1993, 18–20), which “Rawls assumed… would exclude people with severe and permanent physical and mental disabilities” (Stanford). Martha Nussbaum “contends that the equal citizenship of those individuals requires that they be enabled to exercise such political rights as voting and jury service through appropriate surrogates” (Stanford) while “Wasserman and McMahan (2012) question whether those rights could be meaningfully exercised by surrogates for individuals with the most severe intellectual disabilities” (Stanford). It is possible to understand these objections as questions of degree rather than as questions of values: the disagreement seems to relate not to whether the differing capacities are relevant but to how much of the difference is relevant and what types of modifications in the law are necessary to accommodate/address these differences. Even still, there is an ongoing debate about discrimination based on capacity that Hart brushes