Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe

Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis are both Professors at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Germany.

Introduction; 1: From Limits to Laws: The Construction of the Nomological Image of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy; 2: Expressing Nature's Regularities and their Determinations in the Late Renaissance; 3: The Legitimation of Law through God, Tradition, Will, Nature and Constitution; 4: The Concept of (Natural) Law in the Doctrine of Law and Natural Law of the Early Modern Era; 5: ‘Lex certa' and ‘ius certum': The Search for Legal Certainty and Security; 6: Crimen contra naturam; 7: Nature's Regularity in Some Protestant Natural Philosophy Textbooks 1530–1630; 8: Natural Order and Divine Salvation: Protestant Conceptions in Early Modern Germany (1550–1750); 9: Natural Law and Celestial Regularities from Copernicus to Kepler; 10: The Approach to a Physical Concept of Law in the Early Modern Period: A Comparison between Matthias Bernegger and Richard Cumberland; 11: Leibniz's Concept of jus naturale and lex naturalis — defined ‘with geometric certainty'; 12: Controversies on Nature as Universal Legality (1680–1710); 13: From Principles to Regularities: Tracing ‘Laws of Nature' in Early Modern France and England; 14: Unruly Weather: Natural Law Confronts Natural Variability; 15: In Search of the Newton of the Moral World: The Intelligibility of Society and the Naturalist Model of Law from the End of the Seventeenth Century to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century; 16: Deus legislator