Write short notes on living law

Core claim: there is a higher law — of nature, reason, God or human dignity — by which positive law must be measured; law and morality are necessarily connected; an unjust law is, in the strong version, no law at all (lex injusta non est lex). Phases (learn the arc — "three floruits"): A. Ancient (Greek and Roman): The Greeks discovered it: Heraclitus's logos, the Sophists contested it (nomos vs physis — convention vs nature), Socrates died by it (obeying the law while proving a law higher than it), Plato argued justice in the Republic, Aristotle distinguished natural from conventional justice; the Stoics universalised it — one reason for all humankind. Cicero gave the classic Roman statement: true law is "right reason in agreement with nature… it cannot be repealed or abolished" — preceding and judging the enactments of the senate. Roman law absorbed it (the ius gentium, law of all nations, applied to non-citizens — natural law as legal cosmopolitanism). B. Medieval (Christian): St. Thomas Aquinas — the grand synthesis: the fourfold hierarchy — eternal law (God's plan), natural law (rational creatures' participation in it), divine law (scripture), human law (the state's enactments). Human law not according to reason is "a perversion of law" — conscience may resist. Natural law now had a theology — and a church to…