Natural Law
I was motivated to write the piece and hold this inquiry in myself for the past couple of weeks after some exchanges and conversations with incredible wise women where this topic of Natural Law came up.
Encountering Natural Law as a Concept
Because I did not do a basic law degree, I never studied jurisprudence1 and never learned any legal philosophy. The first time I came across the phrase ‘Natural Law’ was 8 or 9 years ago after reading two separate books that deeply touched on this idea. The first book was ‘The Ecology of Law - Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community’ by Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei. The second was ‘Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice’ by Cormac Cullinan.
“Law’s rules, backed up by force, are designed to clip, prune, and train the wilderness of human behaviour into the manicured lawns and shrubbery of the civilised garden. ‘Wild’, on the other hand, is synonymous with unkempt, barbarous, unrefined, uncivilised, unrestrained, wayward, disorderly, irregular, our of control, unconventional, undisciplined, passionate, violent, uncultivated, and riotous.…It is precisely the rigidity of this false dichotomy between the ‘wild’ and ‘law’, between ‘nature’ and ‘civilisation’, that we need to overcome.”
‘Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice’ by Cormac Cullinan
Both sets of authors in their own ways, and coming from different angles, deeply questioned and convincingly dismantled - what was in my mind and felt experience - the rigidity, certainty and authority of western legal systems and our ways of practising law. And they returned the reader - with convincing arguments but also with a sense of genuine longing and personal emotion felt through the words - to the breathing ground of nature for a new model for law.
On reading these books I remember experiencing such deep positive body responses, waves of relief and recognition, multiple ‘a-ha moments’, delight, affirmation. They touched such a deep knowing inside me. I knew deep inside my own experience that what these authors were pointing towards was true.
I reviewed and promoted both of the books in the magazine I ran at the time, I spoke about them to many people, I studied them, highlighted them, made detailed notes on my computer, and have cited quotes from them in numerous articles.
“We must rethink our human laws and their relationship with the laws governing the ecology of a living planet. Such a rethinking, a kind of Copernican revolution in the law, must use nature as a mentor and model, outing the commons and a long-term vision at center stage. We must move from thinking of a ‘mechanism of law’ and moved toward an ‘ecology of law’.”
‘The Ecology of Law - Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community’ by Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei
And yet…
What continued to nag at me, what continued to remain unresolved was a knotty conundrum right in the centre of both these books. While it was recognised and remembered that the earth (or nature, ecology, wildness…) held the golden keys for a return to holistic systems of wild law or earth jurisprudence or a new eco-legal order, it still ‘felt’ to me as though we had to somehow effortfully learn how to replicate nature in our thinking and actions in order to move towards creating these new systems of law.
My body remembered something different…
Encountering Natural Law as a field of reality
I had already encountered the field of Natural Law up close and intimately - not as a theory or concept, not as an ideal or aspiration, not as a framework or intricate system - but as a pulsing black, all-encompassing field that emanated from the centre of my own body.
It has been this encounter and nothing else - no teacher, no book, no words, no philosophy no matter how inspiring - that has pulled me inexorably, despite the confusion, resistance and fear, down the narrow path I am on. The desire to understand, yes but far more than that to know again in the cells of my body, through all the duality, through all the sacred mess of my life, that pulsing black, unified field of consciousness, the great womb.
Many of us have our unique stories about a “spiritual awakening”, where an otherworldly and (what feels like) divine consciousness descends unbidden into our lives! Extremely welcome but unexpected, we dare not touch the edge of this bubble of utopia lest it might burst. For me, in a fortuitous and fateful combination of events and timing in 2008 - intense period of mindful eating, meditation and fasting / studying and absorbing Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Power of Now’ (and, less intensely, ‘A New Earth’) like a devout christian would the holy bible until it’s pages were worn and yellow, and the words were etched on my heart and soul / moving countries to Australia where I later learned I have very benefic astrocartography lines in my natal chart - my entire being opened up to a new field of reality.
In what felt like a welcome dissolution of the “me” that I was up to then, a unified field descended where all of the happenings in my life seemed to unfold in perfect timing and order, in the most beautiful, soft and expansive way, and where love seemed to ripple out from the centre of myself in ways I had never experienced before, and frequently brought me to tears. I would say to people afterwards “I felt I had died and entered a parallel universe” so complete was the shift from previous ordinary reality (which had felt almost continuously challenging and fragmented).
It was my destiny somehow to experience this dramatic inner shift alongside an intense and formative initiation in the legal profession. It was my first real and serious position on the 10th floor of a global corporate law firm following qualification with the hallmarks of high stress and overwhelm. Working with partners at the top of their field, important million-dollar cases, billable hours with competitive colleagues, time-sheets and daily deadlines.
What is landing very deeply within me in recent weeks, is that the daily weaving together of this felt field of awakening in my body with the reality of working in a fast-paced, high-functioning law firm brought alive in a unique way, and in a way that I didn’t then really understand, this field of Natural Law.
Natural Law may be known as a subject in law schools with a history, principles and complicated legal arguments. But, when you reflect on the basics of how it is described, when you look even briefly into the history (and women reading this may want to dip into that a little deeper!), and when you read comprehensive books by widely respected authors and legal thinkers like the two I have mentioned above, it feels undeniably apparent that, at its core, the term Natural Law is pointing us back to the law that exists within that pulsing black shimmering void from which all emerges, from which all is birthed, and to which all returns.
That is also why I feel women on a womb awakening journey (and men too) have so much wisdom to share about Law and Justice. They can perceive this field, and access its wisdom, naturally and express this from the centre of their own knowing - not through going to the library and reading books!! I wrote recently about how I feel the qualifications for being a “lawyer” are under deep evolution.
On a day-to-day basis to practice law from this place felt like the most profound (and completely unfamiliar for me at that time) sense of harmony and equilibrium, life was happening, there were challenges and issues to deal with, there was duality, complexity, chaos - and yet there was a knowing of how to respond to every moment in the most beautiful, affirming and precise way. There was an innate knowing of when to act and when not to act, when to speak and when not to speak. When the usual layers of normal conditioning and then, on top of that, legal conditioning were not able to interfere, it felt as though the field was taking care of everything, and the only (considerable) task was to continue to listen, and to move in harmony with it.
To experience this field in real terms juxtaposed against the legal system and judicial law also in a way began the process of melting or dissolving that system for me, inside of me, such that I could not - with any sense of conviction - continue to build a legal career within it.
Inevitably with spiritual awakening experiences that have mostly arrived as a gift, over time the layers that had softened in the background began to reemerge! The visceral somatic memories have never left though, and they rested in my cells long enough to keep me asking these questions. For now, this is my deep contemplation on Natural Law - it has awakened another layer of my own journey and affirmed the slow, winding (who knows how long) return for our legal systems back to the arms of the Great Mother. She is the ultimate law boss!
I’m Elaine – woman, (solo) mother, philosophising-lawyer, vocal for the return of healing feminine energy in all its forms to the world, particularly its governance and legal systems. My delight is integrating practical and legal knowledge with cutting-edge feminine and esoteric wisdom including ancient womb teachings, the science of astrology and the mystical teachings of the gene keys. Read more on my website.
[extracted from a google search]
Jurisprudence in law schools is a theoretical and philosophical examination of law rather than a study of specific statutes. It explores what law is, where it comes from, and its role in society.
Students study major schools of thought such as Natural Law, Legal Positivism, Legal Realism, and Critical Legal Studies to critically evaluate legal systems.
Natural law is a system of justice derived from nature, considered common to all humans, and existing independently of societal rules or positive law. It posits that objective moral principles are the basis for valid positive laws. Thinkers like Cicero and Thomas Aquinas articulated and systematized natural law, asserting its connection to moral truths and the common good. Even figures such as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, despite their differing perspectives, contributed to the development of natural law theories during the Enlightenment.
Legal positivism is a philosophy of law asserting that the validity of a law comes solely from its enactment by political authority or social acceptance. It emphasizes that law is a social construction—“posited” by humans—and its existence is entirely separate from its moral content or alignment with abstract principles of justice. The term comes from the Latin word positum, meaning “to posit” or “put in place”. It is called positivism because it treats law as something “posited”—meaning it is artificially established, commanded, or socially constructed by human authorities rather than being derived from abstract divine or natural moral principles.
Legal realism is a jurisprudential theory stating that the law is shaped by human judgment, social forces, and public policy, rather than just abstract rules. It suggests that judges’ personal values and societal realities heavily influence their decisions.
Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is a theory asserting that law is inherently political, subjective, and designed to preserve the societal status quo. Emerging in the 1970s, it argues that legal doctrines are shaped by power dynamics that favor historically privileged groups over marginalized ones. CLS revolutionized legal scholarship by dismantling the myth of legal neutrality.
What I understand more clearly now is that this means prospective lawyers are immediately trained into the existing system of law (Legal Positivism), and in that training not (necessarily or at all) given the opportunity to deepen into broader questions about what law and justice actually means, its foundations and roots - or invited into contemplation, and challenged, about what we feel it means for us. Yes, there is training on ethics but my memory (and I may be wrong as it was nearly 20 years ago) is that this was more about the code of conduct expected of lawyers within the system. A brief google search confirms that ethics training in professional practice involves (this confirms my memory):
“learning the mandatory rules, moral principles, and fiduciary duties that govern a lawyer’s behavior. It trains legal professionals to navigate conflicts of interest, protect client confidentiality, and balance zealous advocacy with their overriding duty to the justice system.”