Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 28

Modern Age

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Winter 2018

Natural law
"Unenumerated rights" are the Holy Grail of libertarian constitutional theory. Without them, the Constitution is just another text,
and is reduced to the status of "positive law" defined by its written terms. Libertarians sometimes view this as "amoral," "relativistic," or "nihilistic," but texts are agnostic. Justice Antonin Scalia
described the Constitution as "a practical and pragmatic charter
of government." Libertarian theorists discover the "unenumerated rights" thought to inhabit the Constitution in the notion
of "natural law" or "natural rights" that was a common thread in
eighteenth-century political philosophy and jurisprudence.
To libertarians, "natural law" serves the same role as the openended "penumbras, formed by emanations" that Justice William O.
Douglas used to recognize a constitutional right to "marital privacy" in Griswold v. Connecticut and the "mystery passage" Justice
Anthony Kennedy used in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to extend
the holding of Roe v. Wade to ban any restrictions that placed an
"undue burden" on abortion access. In short, it is an artifice to
allow activist judges to ignore the text of the Constitution and
make rulings based on their personal policy preferences. Most
originalists scoff at the search for "penumbras" and Justice Kennedy's navel-gazing that masquerades as constitutional law, but
resort to "natural law" is just as subjective, and therefore equally
prone to abuse.
True, the Declaration of Independence explicitly refers to natural rights. But the Declaration is not the same as the Constitution.
The Declaration was a proclamation justifying secession, not a
social compact or a governing document. The Declaration was
never ratified by the states. And even the Declaration acknowledges that men institute governments "to secure these rights"-
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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Contents
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