The Critique of Natural Right in The Outsider and the Construction of Existentialist Jurisprudence

Modern jurisprudence faces a foundational crisis where the rejection of transcendent standards reduces justice to subjective preference. While Leo Strauss attempts to rescue modernity from this relativism by recovering classical natural right—relying on a teleological framework and a salutary myth to sustain political order—this paper argues that such a theoretical compromise harbors latent authoritarian potential. By applying Strauss’s framework to Albert Camus’s The Outsider, this analysis demonstrates how the courtroom actualizes the vulnerabilities of natural right. The prosecutor inverts teleology, transforming the salutary myth into a retroactive mechanism for social exclusion and spiritual subjugation, convicting the protagonist not merely for murder, but for refusing to perform conventional moral rituals. To resolve the ensuing normative vacuum without retreating into nihilism, this paper constructs an existentialist jurisprudence grounded in Camus’s concept of rebellion. By transitioning from the isolated absurd to shared human vulnerability (I rebel—therefore we exist), it establishes a horizontal contract. This framework delineates a restrained legal geometry: it provides an immanent justification for punishing physical murder while strictly prohibiting the judicial coercion of an individual’s internal consciousness, condemning the act on the beach without demanding the tear at the funeral.