Natural Law Perspective

Neil Boyd (1994) asserts in his Canadian Law: An Introduction, "There is no doubt that morality is at the heart of the legal process. However, a perspective that demands a linkage between law and morality must specify the moral premises that will operate at any specific time and place" (p. 10). Boyd (1944) adds, "Since there is no single, clear, morality to guide the operation of legality, an attempt to divine natural law can be compared to trying to nail Jello-O to the wall" (p. 10). "Divination" should be the province of oracles rather than the law; thus, lawyers would presumably be better off working from a positivist perspective, one that is not as relative to the vagaries of time and place. Local standards of morality (as in standards of community decency) pose one stumbling block to reliance upon a natural law point of view.

Positivism, rooted in the British doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, is the philosophical source of laws (valid sets of rules), enforced through a system of economic and social sanctions. As Boyd (1994) notes, "It is vital that the rules be applied correctly, but t

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cially that, as labour is basic to wealth, historical development, following scientific laws determined by dialectical materialism, must lead to the violent overthrow of the capitalist class . . . Events would then progress towards the ideal of a classless society" (p. 13). A discussion of marxism must include an understanding of "dialectics" and "dialectical materialism." As Robert Heilbroner (1980) writes in "The Dialectical Approach to Philosophy," "the most important reason to begin a study of Marxism with an examination of dialectics is simply to become familiar with a vocabulary that is inseparable from Marxist thought" (p. 29). Heilbroner (1980) concedes that "there is no single established meaning for dialectics, and still less so for the dialectics incorporated within Marxism" (p. 30). Even so, dialectical materialism is the name given to the philosophical process of inquiring into the particular contradictory tendencies within a given social process (Heilbroner, 1980, p. 39). Looking at a social reality (a small proportion of the population holds most of its wealth) from a dialectical perspective yields the revelation that there exists its dialectical opposite (an historical tendency for the masses to be exploited by
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Approximate Word count = 2857
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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