262 A Positive Century (1815–1914)very crucially based on an intrinsic sense of law or rightness, combined with
the important principle of reciprocity.
It was therefore possible for positivists to acknowledge the existence of
what was sometimes called a “common juridical conscience.” Th e German
lawyer Franz von Liszt was a believer in this— even as he rejected natural
law as a source of law. In a similar vein, the French writer Antoine Pillet, a
professor at the University of Grenoble, writing in the 1890s, spoke of what
he called “the common law of humanity,” which he held to be distinct from
international law. It existed, in his opinion, “outside of and above interna-
tional society and the law to which it corresponds.” Some were willing to
give the common juridical conscience a somewhat greater role. One of these
was the Belgian lawyer Ernest Nys, who taught at the University of Brussels
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He went so far as to
hold the common juridical conscience to be the sole primary source of inter-
national law, with custom and treaties being only secondary sources.
Such ideas, however, should not be thought of as endorsements of natu-
ral law in its full- bodied form— that is, as an elaborately detailed, compre-
hensive, systematic body of substantive rules. Instead, the notion of the
common juridical conscience merely referred, rather loosely, to certain com-
monsense values, or basic conceptions of justice. Th ese could be admitted
to be uniformly held throughout the world without doing undue violence
to positivist doctrine.
Th ere were, however, some international lawyers who went beyond these
general considerations to a more or less forthright endorsement of natural
law— at least as a matter of general principle, even if not in the baroque ra-
tionalist manner of Grotius or Wolff. For example, a number of writers car-
ried the classical dualistic Grotian outlook on into the nineteenth century,
paying little or no heed to the new ways of the positivists. Some writers were
more adventuresome, taking natural law itself in somewhat diff erent direc-
tions than before. In this category were two major fi gures: Johann Kaspar
Bluntschli and James Lorimer.
Th e Grotian Tradition Continued
Th ere were a number of writers who continued in the dualistic Grotian vein
of the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries, seeing international law as an