Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui was a Genevan legal and political theorist who popularised a number of ideas propounded by other thinkers.
Portrait attributed to Robert Gardelle, c. 1760
Principii del diritto politico, 1798 (Milano, Fondazione Mansutti).
Natural law is a system of law based on a close observation of natural order and human nature, from which values, thought by the proponents of this concept to be intrinsic to human nature, can be deduced and applied independently of positive law. According to the theory of law called jusnaturalism, all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason." Natural law theory can also refer to "theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality."
Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Thomas Hobbes