This article examines what limitations to private property John Locke recognizes to protect the rights of the poor. As has been pointed out in the literature, Locke’s ideas on the limitations to private property have been influenced by medieval discussions about the rights of the poor and the principle of extreme necessity. Confirming this interpretation, the article shows that Locke borrows the distinction between ‘ordinary need’ and ‘evident and urgent necessity’ from Thomas Aquinas. Taking position in a debate among Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke argues that the poor have a natural right to the ‘surplus’ of somebody else’s possessions, and that this right becomes legally enforceable in case of ‘evident and urgent necessity.’

This paper concentrates on the dynamic tension between law as it is ‘made’ by legal professionals, functioning as homo faber, and law as it is experienced by citizens, functioning as homo agens. In between those two worlds, law develops as a human condition, a term borrowed from Hannah Arendt. It is argued that, in regard to law development and administration of justice, the function of homo agens should have priority over the function of homo faber. The two basic faculties that connect the two worlds are judgment and speech. This leads to further thoughts on the character of judgment as ‘participatory judgment,’ the function of ‘middle terms’ in legal language and the concept of ‘shared responsibility.’

This article addresses the possibility of deriving ought from is. To that purpose it casts doubt on the very distinction between is and ought; distinguishes between duties, obligations, being obligated and owing to do something; revitalises Searle’s famous derivation of ought from is by replacing promises with contracts; and discusses some of the traditional objections against this derivation. The conclusions are that it is not problematic at all to ‘derive’ the existence of obligations from solely is-premises, and that it is not very problematic to ‘derive’ an ought from the existence of an obligation. The quotes around ‘derive’ signal that the nature of derivation also plays a role in this discussion.