The unwritten laws
On the axis: Law and conscience · the unwritten laws
Antigone buries her brother against the city's decree, in the name of laws no one has written: if there is a right above the laws, is a law that violates it still a law, or merely an order?
Justification
The Thomist doctrine of is the medieval ancestor of natural rights: there is a just that does not depend on the legislator's will but on the nature ordered by God, and human law only determines or applies this prior norm. Positive law derives its validity from its conformity to natural law; it is not held to be a sheer creation of the sovereign, which places Thomas on the side of natural rights against the legal positivism to come.
Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 95, a. 2
Justification
The state of nature is no licence: it is governed by a law of nature that reason discovers. Since all men are the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, none has the right to destroy another or to put him under his absolute power. From this original equality Locke derives, not a mere duty not to harm, but correlative subjective rights, to life, liberty and estate, that each bears prior to any government. Power is therefore legitimate only to secure them; to violate them makes it tyrannical. These "unalienable rights" would pass almost word for word into the American Declaration of Independence.
Second Treatise of Government, II-V
Anchors: Thomas Aquinas · Locke
leads to: Nature of rights