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[4] During the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of natural laws was used to challenge the divine right of kings, and became an alternative justification for the establishment of a social contract, positive law, and government – and thus legal rights – in the form of classical republicanism. Conversely, the concept of natural rights is used ...
It also contained three new limits on state power: a state shall not violate a citizen's privileges or immunities; shall not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and must guarantee all persons equal protection of the laws. These limitations dramatically expanded the protections of the Constitution.
Equality before the law is one of the basic principles of some definitions of liberalism. [2] [3] It is incompatible with legal slavery. Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law". [1]
Though equality under the law is an American legal tradition arguably dating to the Declaration of Independence, [4] formal equality for many groups remained elusive. Before passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, which included the Equal Protection Clause, American law did not extend constitutional rights to black Americans. [5]
An example often given is the government infringing on the right to perform some type of religious worship, unless there is an important government interest, like public safety.
Today, laws that appear to circumvent some Supreme Court decisions or federal law may sometimes be called laws of nullification, including in cases if they do not explicitly urge to defy federal law or resist federal authority. Examples of this usage include the Texas Heartbeat Act and the Missouri Second Amendment Preservation Act [41] or ...
The words "equal justice under law" paraphrase an earlier expression coined in 1891 by the Supreme Court. [7] [8] In the case of Caldwell v.Texas, Chief Justice Melville Fuller wrote on behalf of a unanimous Court as follows, regarding the Fourteenth Amendment: "the powers of the States in dealing with crime within their borders are not limited, but no State can deprive particular persons or ...
[14] Tucker stated that equal liberty should be protected through voluntary association rather than through government because the latter is the negation of equal liberty. [ 14 ] According to John F. Welsh, equal liberty is "an absolute or first principle for Tucker since it appears as a core concept in all of his writing.