The Superiority or Integrity of Natural Law for Our Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The idea of the two laws, one resting solely on human authority and the other claiming divine or natural origin and therefore entitled to supremacy over mere human law, has a long and chequered history, and still possesses vitality in the 21st century. Human rights infringements by positive law, under the enactments of the Choice of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 and the South African Schools Act 84 of 1996, have led to a revival of natural law thinking. The aim of this paper will be to explore briefly the significance of natural law thinking in the past, to establish the forms in which it manifests itself in the present day, and to attempt to evaluate the contribution it may be capable of making to the problems of law in the modern world. Primarily, a theory of natural law needs to be undertaken to assist the practical reflections of those concerned to act, whether as judges, statesmen, citizens. The principles of natural law are traced out not only in religion, moral philosophy, and/or ethics and “individual” conduct, but also in political philosophy and jurisprudence, in political action, adjudication, and the life of the citizen. They require that authority be exercised, in most circumstances, according to the manner conveniently labelled as the Constitution or the “rule of law” and with due respect for human rights which embody the requirements of justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".