Guardians of the Republic

The first substantive portion of the paper will offer an elementary model of naturallaw reasoning as a point of departure for thinking about law and justice. Although the term"natural law" has many implications, in this paper it stands for the modest common senseproposition that some rights and duties can be discerned, by operation of our reason, fromour common humanity and our human relationships. Natural law reasoning has beenextended far beyond this basic proposition - but not in this paper, which concedes thatdisagreement is reasonable and inevitable in the application of this proposition.