John Finnis

Life and ideas

John Finnis, born in Adelaide in 1940, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar under H.L.A. Hart and became Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford as well as a professor at Notre Dame in the United States. His Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) renewed the natural law tradition in a form that does not rest on religion or on claims about human nature but on seven basic goods that are self-evidently worth pursuing, such as life, knowledge, play, friendship and practical reasonableness. The requirements of practical reasonableness yield moral principles, and law's role is to coordinate the pursuit of the common good. A rule that grossly violates them has less than the full authority of law, though it may remain law in a lesser sense. His work also covers authority, rights and the ethics of public life.