This is the web page for HON 410 (78120): Philosophy, Politics, and Law
Fall semester, 2009
MW 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Cereus Hall (CERHAL) 201
Instructor: Michael J. White
E-mail: mjwhite@asu.edu
Tels. 480 965-0105/965-0219

1. Link to .pdf file of syllabus.
2. Link to handout on the ‘purpose of law’.
3. Link to .pdf file of part of first readings.
4. Link to Plato, Laws, Book IV.
5. Link to Plato, Minos.
6. Link to chapter, from A Companion to Plato (ed. Hugh H. Benson, Blackwell Publishing, 2006), by Susan Sauvé Meyers, “Plato on the Law”.
7. Link to continuation of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I and first part of Book II.
8. Link to notes on the concept of natural law (and Aristotle).
9. Link to short selection from introduction to and text of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (On Moral Ends or On the Ends of Goods and Evils).
10. Link to short selection from Cicero’s De officiis (On Duties).
11. Link to notes on jurisprudence of Cicero/Stoics.
12. Link to notes on Roman law.
13. The two Latin terms for ‘law’: ‘lex’ and ‘ius’.
14. Link to selections from Alan Watson, The Spirit of Roman Law (University of Georgia Press, 1995).
15. Link to selections from Justinian’s Institutes.
16. Link to background notes on Thomas Aquinas.
17. Link to selections from Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua.
18. Link to notes on Marsilius of Padua.
19. Link to take-home midterm examination.
20. Link to handout on late-scholastic and Renaissance theories of the origin of political/legal authority.
21. Link to selections from Francisco Suarez’s De legibus—pertaining to the relation between natural law and God.
22. Link to background notes on Thomas Hobbes.
23. Link to notes on Samuel Pufendorf.
24. Link to selections from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (from The Sovereignty of the Law, ed. Gareth Jones [University of Toronto Press, 1973]). (Missing page from Blackstone.)
25. Link to notes on William Blackstone.
26. Link to (a) first selections from John Austin’s The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, (b) second selections from The Province of Jurisprudence Determined.
27. Link to notes on John Austin.