Natural Law and the Cultivation of Legal Rhetoric

Natural Law and the Cultivation of Legal Rhetoric in Rediscovering Fuller Essays on Implicit Law and Institutional Design. This essay appears in a book celebrating Lon Fuller\u27s contributions to jurisprudence. I argue that Fuller\u27s conception of secular natural law, designated as an internal morality of law, lends welcome assistance to the effort to articulate a new direction in legal philosophy. I defend Fuller\u27s natural-law approach from the common misinterpretations that it is either a hollow echo of the natural law tradition or an essentialist conception of law at odds with the legal-realist world that he helped to create with his doctrinal scholarship. By reading his famous, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, in a new light, I contend that Fuller\u27s natural-law approach is best understood as an attempt to outline the social framework in which acquiring legal knowledge – defined not as the technical mastery of doctrine or the rationalistic apprehension of conceptual verities, but rather as a rhetorical-hermeneutical event that is a social achievement – is possible.https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/facultybooks/1016/thumbnail.jp