It is difficult to acknowledge, without being either neglectful or tedious, all those people and institutions whose influence have contributed to a book about one’s deepest convictions. But my debts are such as to oblige me to run these risks. Let me begin with the people. My gratitude goes, first and foremost, to my parents, to whom this book is dedicated: my father, Ronald, the court of law and justice, and my mother, Florice, the court of equity and understanding. At least those were the roles they played convincingly before I was old enough to have them as my closest friends. My father’s overriding concern for principle, right, and liberty certainly was responsible for my goal, acquired at the age of 10, to become a lawyer—a criminal lawyer to be specific—in order to make the world a more just place, and has shaped my intellectual agenda ever since. Though he was distressed when, in college, I was diverted to philosophy, his concern was short-lived for, as he later admitted, philosophy turned out to have been good for me. I owe that diversion, which forever changed my life, to Henry Veatch, whose every philosophy course I took when he taught at Northwestern, but who taught me as much outside of the classroom as within. Henry (I still have a hard time calling him anything other than Professor Veatch) devoted an incredible amount of time and energy to me, a lowly undergraduate, patiently enduring my endless questioning, not to mention my flirtations with political and philosophical views which to him could only have seemed like the follies of youth. It was Henry’s impassioned Aristotelian-Thomist defense of natural law in both his classes and, especially, in his books, Rational Man and For an Ontology of Morals, that persuaded me to adopt what was then, in the heyday of analytic philosophy, considered to be an archaic position which time had passed well by. It was also from Henry I first learned that natural law and natural rights were distinct, for when I encountered the latter and rushed eagerly to share with him my discovery, my enthusiasm was met with a fatherly disapproval I would never forget. Imagine my surprise when, some years later, Henry presented an Aristotelian defense of natural rights in his book, Human Rights: Fact or Fancy? I know Henry, now in his 80s, must be disappointed that my explication of natural law in Chapter 1 is not more Aristotelian. I can only plead that it is also not meant to be anti-Aristotelian and that my account of natural law is a minimalist one intended to sweep broadly and for a very limited purpose. My objective was to take no position on the merits of a more teleological natural law, given that it was unnecessary to do so to explain the conception of natural rights which I employ here.