of the Declaration. It has also been
appealed to in many other social
movements that oppose structures
of injustice. Martin Luther King,
Jr., for example, appealed to the
natural law (and to St. Thomas Aquinas
by name) in his famous “Letter from
a Birmingham Jail.”
Even two hundred years before
the founding of the United States,
Dominicans appealed to the natural
law to oppose injustice. In the 1500s,
the Spanish Dominican Bartolomé
de las Casas appealed to the natural
law to oppose the practice of the
colonial slave trade of Native Americans.
The Dominican tradition of affirming
the reality of the na