Burlamaqui was born on July 13, 1694 in Geneva as son of Jean-Louis, who was a member of the legislative authority of the city, the council of two hundred, and of Suzanne Favre de la Croix. His ancestors, the Burlamacchi, had emigrated from the Italian city of Lucca after the Reformation. Jean-Jacques studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the Academy of Geneva from 1709 to 1716, when he obtained his official law exam. On April 26, 1717, he got married to Renée, the daughter of Jacob de Chapeaurouge (1669-1744), who was a member of the small council and syndic. Having already taught private lessons on natural law to sons of patrician Genevan families and to foreigners, he was awarded the title of honorary professor by the city council in 1720. The same year, he travelled to England and joined his friend, the theologian Ami Lullin (1695-1756), for a short study stay at Oxford University. In 1721 the two friends travelled back to Geneva via the Netherlands, where Burlamaqui visited Jean Barbeyrac at the University of Groningen.

In 1722, the small council decided to create two professorships in law in order to assure that natural law would henceforth be taught at the Academy. Shortly after Jean Cramer (1701-1773), Burlamaqui was appointed professor of natural and civil law on 29 March, 1723, and he mainly taught natural law on the basis of Barbeyrac's richly commented French translation of Samuel Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis. Besides the regular students, some of the numerous young nobles from England and Germany visiting the city also attended his classes.

While he was in England, Burlamaqui had been elected to the council of two hundred, and he was appointed to the council of sixty in 1730. He thus participated in the political affairs of the city and got involved in the turmoil of 1734. Together with three other commissioners he was in charge of writing a report on behalf of the government concerning the demands of the bourgeoisie, which were rejected. During the political unrests, he left the city, since he accompanied his pupil Frederick II, Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, to his court. The prince had come to study in Geneva in 1732. He returned after the turmoil and remained there until 1737. During these years, Burlamaqui was in charge of teaching the prince the law of nature and nations. When the two were not together, the teaching continued via correspondence. Burlamaqui taught until 1739. Because of ill health, his former substitute Pierre Lullin officially replaced him in 1740. Despite his unwillingness, Burlamaqui was elected to the small council in 1742 to which he belonged until his death on April 3, 1748.

Burlamaqui was, above all, a dedicated teacher of natural law. He used Barbeyrac’s French translation of Pufendorf’s manual, Des devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen (1708), as textbook for his courses, and he borrowed extensively from Pufendorf’s and Grotius’ main works, also in Barbeyrac’s translations, Le droit de la nature et des gens (1707), and Le droit de la guerre et de la paix (1724). In 1747 he brought the Principes du droit naturel to publication. He then worked on a study about civil government but was unable to finish the Principes du droit politique before he died. A friend of his, the theologian Jacob Vernet (1698-1789), completed the manuscript based on the lecture notes of Burlamaqui’s courses, and published the work in 1751. At the instigation of Burlamaqui’s sister and his daughter Sara (d. 1782), the government ordered the publisher Barillot to remove the names of the author and printer as well as the place of publication from the copies already printed and from any future publication. Therefore, the Principes du droit politique were considered as the second part of Burlamaqui’s system, and the two parts were later reprinted as Principes or Eléments du droit naturel.

The lecture notes were later used for two new editions. The first one is Fortuné-Barthélemy de Félice’s annotated edition in eight volumes of 1766-1768, entitled Principes du droit de la nature et des gens. Avec la suite du droit de la nature qui n’avoit point encore paru. As de Félice explains in the letter to J. H. S. Formey serving as introduction to the first volume, Burlamaqui’s published work only presented the general principles of natural law and did not show how the latter applied to man’s duties against God, against himself and against others. Having discovered lecture notes on this matter, which would however be very short, he decided to include them in the present edition with his own extended commentary. This is the content of vols. 3-5, which the editor inserted between the Principes du droit naturel (vols. 1-2) and the Principes du droit politique (vols. 6-8). Since de Félice openly admits in his letter to Formey and in the introduction to the third volume that he happened to abridge the original text or to displace a chapter in order to make a coherent whole of the compilation of Burlamaqui’s published work and the text of the lecture notes, his edition, which received highly critical comments in his own time (Viani, 2012, p. 133-135), has to be used with great caution.

The other new edition was Elémens du droit naturel (1775, 1783) and Principes ou Elémens du droit politique (1784), printed in Lausanne by F. Grasset. The first of these volumes comprises a lengthy introduction, composed of a preface and two unsigned letters, the first on the study of civil law, the second on the shortest and easiest method to gain knowledge of the elements of law. The author of this introduction was Jean-Marc-Louis Favre (1733-1793), who held a doctoral degree in law of the University of Tübingen and owned a rich library in the Rolle castle. The letters are excerpts from the missives he had sent to several students of the Pays de Vaud, among them Frédéric-César de la Harpe (1754-1838), the future personal teacher of Alexander I of Russia and leading politician in the formation of the Helvetic Republic, who studied law at the University of Tübingen in the early 1770s. Favre’s editions are the only ones that are exclusively based on the texts Burlamaqui had dictated to his students (Viani, 2012).

Many of Burlamaqui’s published works, or parts thereof, have been translated into English, Dutch, Italian, German, and Danish, and were republished in more than sixty different editions until the second half of the nineteenth century. The first editions of the Principes du droit naturel and of the Principes du droit politique were immediately translated into English by Thomas Nugent, the former in 1748, the latter in 1752. A revised edition was published in 1763 as The Principles of Natural and Politic Law. This was the edition that reached the British and American universities and was studied there for generations.

Burlamaqui has sometimes been taken for an unoriginal compilator. This is because part of his published work, and notably the Principes du droit politique, reproduced the text of his lectures, which borrow extensively from Pufendorf’s and Grotius’ treatises on natural law as well as from Barbeyrac’s commentaries on these works without explicit reference. Yet in the Principes du droit naturel, which he elaborated for publication, he indicates clearly how he wishes to take position on issues discussed by Pufendorf, Barbeyrac and others, and he mentions Samuel Clarke and Francis Hutcheson in the context of his theory of moral obligation, which is no doubt original. A salient feature of this theory is his reliance on man’s striving for perfection and happiness (félicité). It needs yet to be established whether Burlamaqui borrowed this idea from Leibniz or Christian Wolff, or whether he rather referred to Lévesque de Pouilly’s Théorie des sentimens agréables, which Jacob Vernet published in a new edition in 1747. His innovative account of moral obligation allowed Burlamaqui to adopt a critical stance on Pufendorf’s voluntarism Barbeyrac had defended against Leibniz’ objections (Zurbuchen, 2004, Douglass, 2011, pp. 217-20). Since Burlamaqui also discusses the pursuit of happiness in his political theory, Harvey suggested that his theory may have been Jefferson’s main inspiration for including the right to the pursuit of happiness in the American Declaration of Independence (Harvey 1937, pp. 119-24).

Yet another original dimension of Burlamaqui’s natural law is his theory of sovereignty and of mixed government such as the English monarchy or the Genevan aristo-democracy. Independently of Montesquieu, Burlamaqui argued that sovereignty comprises different powers, or parts, which may be divided and entrusted into different hands. While he did not deny that in his native republic the sovereign power originally belonged to the people, he also argued that sovereignty could be exercised jointly by the different orders of the government, that is, by the general council, the council of two hundred, and the small council. As attested by the report he helped elaborating at the request of the Genevan government against the demands of the bourgeoisie, Burlamaqui elaborated a political theory apt at serving the interests of the ruling elite. His theory of sovereignty was thoroughly criticized by Rousseau, who argued in the Social Contract that sovereignty exclusively consists in the legislative power, and that the latter has to be exercised by the people assembled in the general council.

Although Burlamaqui’s natural law theory has been read by generations of students in various European countries and in America, a thoroughgoing study of his impact on later thinkers remains a desideratum.