Abstract

PERELLO, Carlos Felipe Amunátegui. On supernatural law: about the origins of human rights and natural law in antiquity. Fundamina (Pretoria) [online]. 2014, vol.20, n.1, pp.15-26. ISSN 2411-7870.

This article traces the classical roots of natural law and human rights. Although in antiquity there was no concept of human rights, among poets, philosophers and jurists there was an idea of justice that no government could overrule. Although the idea of rights was absent from these constructs, they form the basis of modern legal ideas. We find the first exposition of basic rights in the work of Hesiod, which, after the fifth-century crisis in the Greek concept of the world, led to a new idea of natural justice that was developed by Aristotle.

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