"Ab placito humanum" and the Normativity of Human Laws in the Theological-Political Treatise

The few passages in Spinoza’s work in which he focuses on the concept of human law have not received as much scholarly attention as passages focused on other themes, but they have still been very well examined, as evidenced by, for example, the collection edited by André Campos in 2015, which brought together 21 articles written between 1948 and 2010.1 It is true that most of these studies do not directly aim to determine whether Spinoza adopts a normative conception of human