Why should a Supreme Court justice care about natural rights?

When William Lloyd Garrison energized the American abolitionist movement during the 1830s, he didn’t make a legal case for emancipation, because provisions of the Constitution supported slavery.  He had to make a case independent of law.  He drew on the natural rights principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence to launch his great moral crusade.  He frequently cited the Declaration in his speeches.  “Black children,” he insisted, “possess the same inherent and unalienable rights as ours…”

In July 1847, when housewife Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited four friends in Waterloo, New York, they decided to hold a meeting about women’s rights.  They needed some kind of statement explaining what they wanted.  They realized they could do no better than the natural rights philosophy expressed in the Declaration of Independence.  Stanton drafted what became known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments and went on to launch the movement for women’s rights.

When, during the 1950s, Martin Luther King began leading peaceful protests against state-enforced racial segregation, he couldn’t make a legal argument, because the legal system supported compulsory segregation.  He, too, had to look outside the law and develop a natural rights case.  In August 1963, at the March on Washington, King appealed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence when he said:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed — we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.

Surely it’s not asking too much to have a prospective Supreme Court justice understand and affirm the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of The Triumph of Liberty, Greatest Emancipations, Bully Boy, FDR’s Folly and other books.