Download or read book Ministers of the Law written by Jean Porter and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ministers of the Law Jean Porter articulates a theory of legal authority derived from the natural law tradition. As she points out, the legal authority of most traditions rests on their own internal structures, independent of extralegal considerations -- legal houses built on sand, as it were. Natural law tradition, on the other hand, offers a basis for legal authority that goes beyond mere arbitrary commands or social conventions, offering some extralegal authority without compromising the independence and integrity of the law. Yet Porter does more in this volume than simply discuss historical and theoretical realms of natural law. She carries the theory into application to contemporary legal issues, bringing objective normative structures to contemporary Western societies suspicious of such concepts.