This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of jurisprudence and science in early modern Europe. Taking an interdisciplinary approach these articles stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.

Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis are both Professors at the Max-Planck-Institut fÿr Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Germany.

Introduction; 1: From Limits to Laws: The Construction of the Nomological Image of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy; 2: Expressing Nature's Regularities and their Determinations in the Late Renaissance; 3: The Legitimation of Law through God, Tradition, Will, Nature and Constitution; 4: The Concept of (Natural) Law in the Doctrine of Law and Natural Law of the Early Modern Era; 5: 'Lex certa' and 'ius certum': The Search for Legal Certainty and Security; 6: Crimen contra naturam; 7: Nature's Regularity in Some Protestant Natural Philosophy Textbooks 1530-1630; 8: Natural Order and Divine Salvation: Protestant Conceptions in Early Modern Germany (1550-1750); 9: Natural Law and Celestial Regularities from Copernicus to Kepler; 10: The Approach to a Physical Concept of Law in the Early Modern Period: A Comparison between Matthias Bernegger and Richard Cumberland; 11: Leibniz's Concept of jus naturale and lex naturalis - defined 'with geometric certainty'; 12: Controversies on Nature as Universal Legality (1680-1710); 13: From Principles to Regularities: Tracing 'Laws of Nature' in Early Modern France and England; 14: Unruly Weather: Natural Law Confronts Natural Variability; 15: In Search of the Newton of the Moral World: The Intelligibility of Society and the Naturalist Model of Law from the End of the Seventeenth Century to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century; 16: Deus legislator