Dare I say that this is argumentum ad antiquitatum?
I've read quite a bit of "natural law" from the 1700s, and the common thinking of the natural law philosophers is that the laws of nature and of nature's God can be discovered by clear thinking and some foundational principles.
Like mathematicians with their proofs, the natural law philosophers tend to start out with some basic principles, and derive further insight into natural law by the use of reason.
That something has always been done that way before does not enter into their thinking.
That decisions are seldom derived from "first principles" is one thing that I have always seen as a flaw in our legal system.
The reason I see it as a flaw is because if any precedent has an error in it, that error translates into subsequent errors for any decisions using it as precedent.
Plessy vs Ferguson comes to mind.
Dare I say that this is argumentum ad antiquitatum?
You are free to say that but I prefer English.
I've read quite a bit of "natural law" from the 1700s, and the common thinking of the natural law philosophers is that the laws of nature and of nature's God can be discovered by clear thinking and some foundational principles.
I do not get law from philosophers who speak of their opinion on the way things ought to be. The law is whatever the government says it is. Whether it is stupid or not does not matter. A philosopher's opinion about how the law ought to be does not change how the law actually is.