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The concept of natural rights has an important place in American political thought as reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which used natural rights to justify revolution.
As a term of politics and jurisprudence, natural law is a body of rules prescribed by an authority superior to that of the state. It is intended to protect individual rights from infringement by other individuals, nation-states, or political orders.
Individuals give up their natural rights to judge disputes and enforce the law of nature, and in thus giving up their individual rights they create the original powers of government: the legislative and executive, a distinction that Locke uses to justify a fundamental separation of powers.
The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, was established in 1791 to guard against an oppressive national government by establishing certain rights.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights was unanimously adopted by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, 1776. The declaration was particularly influential on later state constitutions because it represented the first protection of individual human rights under state constitutions of the American revolutionary period.
The First Amendment right to speak freely as an exercise of people’s natural rights does not mean everything anyone says anywhere is morally acceptable. Constitutionally speaking, ignorant, demeaning and vitriolic speech — including hate speech — are all protected from government repression, even though they may be morally offensive to ...
Montesquieu, who believed that religious beliefs and fear of eternal rewards or punishment, could lead to better civic life, also favored religious toleration, such as that later reflected in the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
Federalism is the theory of distributing power between national and state governments. The relation between federalism and the First Amendment has important dimensions involving political theory. Modern federalism was created at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, pictured here.
The concept of natural rights has an important place in American political thought as reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which used natural rights to justify revolution.
Though a leading Federalist, Adams makes clear in letters to Jefferson that he would have preferred that the Constitution be prefaced by a “declaration of rights,” as was the Massachusetts Constitution (1780), for which Adams served as primary author.