of whether particular positive law is in need of change that can be brought about by changes in rules--as prescribed in the rule theory of law--and this requires a fundamental knowledge of the legal positivism underlying the approaches of those who, in the social critic's opinion, may be upholding the law for its own sake at the expense of justice.
Legal naturalism describes those diverse theories of law that do not accept human law as true law and hold that a particular "something other than the positive law [is] the true law and ascribe to it a superior status over the positive law" (Sinha 84). The claims of natural law--based on God, nature, virtue, and right reason--have been put forward in many societies since the invention of the concept of dharma, "the divinely ordained norm of good conduct," in India 3,500 years ago (Sinha 85). More recently natural-law thinking has made a return and in the twentieth century numerous formulations have been put forward that view natural law as "objectively given value, as morals, as deontology . . . as ethical jurisprudence, as a relationship between moral truths and general facts, and as the inner morality of law" (Sinha 113-14). These formulations derive from the metaphysical-rational epistemology, the claim that "all knowledge is contained in nature and it is discovered by reason," which undergirds most natural law theory (Sinha 76). But there are also recent natural law approaches related to sociology and anthropology that are based on a strictly empiricist epistemology.
Classical legal naturalism held for several different types of knowledge that could be discovered in nature by reason. The Roman writer Cicero, for example, held that true law "is right reason in agreement with nature" and that this immutable, universally valid law could not be changed, repealed, or abolished since it derived from God (Sinha 88). In this theory justice was based on law which is right reason "ap...