 In Republic 5, Scipio had affirmed that the political leader requires knowledge of justice and of the laws and will have studied their foundations. The discussion of natural law in Laws 1 offers an account of those foundations. The purpose of such an account is to set the parameters within which more concrete laws must fall and be judged. The natural law is god’s law; it is also what human beings who have perfected their reason would follow. Law is to be identified with right reason (1.23), or more specifically with right reason in the realm of what is commanded or forbidden (1.33, 1.42). This, then, is a normative account: it tells us what law, properly speaking, is; and that may be very different from the actual laws that particular states have enacted.