Only the Law Would Rule Between Us: Antimiscegenation, The Moral Economy of Dependency, and the Debate over Rights after the Civil War - Freedom: Personal Liberty and Private Law (original) (raw)
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Please cite the published version. [Milo Minderbinder] raised the price of food in his mess halls so high that all officers and enlisted men had to turn over all their pay to him in order to eat. Their alternative, there was an alternative, of course-since Milo detested coercion, and was a vocal champion of freedom of choice-was to starve. When he encountered a wave of enemy resistance to this attack, he stuck to his position without regard to safety or reputation, and gallantly invoked the law of supply and demand.
The “liberty” protected by the United States Constitution has been variously interpreted as the “liberty” of thinking persons to speak, worship and associate with others, unimpeded by onerous state law; the liberty of consumers and producers to make individual market choices, including the choice to sell one’s labour at any price one sees fit, free of redistributive or paternalistic legislation that might restrict it; and the liberty of all of us in the domestic sphere to make choices regarding reproductive and family life, free of state law that might restrict it on grounds relating to public morals. Although the United States Supreme Court had never done so, the same phrase could be also interpreted as protecting the positive liberty of individuals to engage in decent work, to enjoy general physical safety and welfare, and to be prepared for the duties of citizenship. Such a progressive interpretation, in fact, might be more in line with the overall purpose of the Reconstruction A...
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Few issues in American history remain as troubling as Thomas Jefferson's toleration of slavery, so clearly inconsistent with his own expressions of man's natural rights. Not only the cruelty but also the manifest injustice of slaveholding detracts from Jefferson's reputation. The terrible irony of his public life was that the very principles he advocated for the design of the new nation-a commitment t o majority rule, limited government, the authority of law, and the protection of property rights-restrained him in attacking the institution that he knew threatened the American republic. This is not to say, as some have argued, that republican ideology embraced slavery, but that Jefferson's conception of its implementation in the new nation's political and legal institutions precluded aggressive governmental action to emancipate the slaves. Jefferson accepted the "form" of republican government as the only means of securing man's political liberty. This governmental form included a commitment to the rule of law as the basis of both social organization and change. Jefferson's belief in the importance of form, evident in his architectural and musical preferences, and even in his personal relationships, is less obvious in his commitment to law as the means of social governance. In this commitment he epitomizes the Enlightenment modernist's acceptance of form as liberalizing. In the same way that the symmetry of Mozart's compositions or the American adaptation of classical columns or friezes reflected the limits upon man's reason posed by taste and judgment, the founding father's dependence upon law reflected a recognition of liberty restrained by the need for social order. Only when the parameters of taste, judgment, order, or virtue were accepted could man truly be free t o pursue the limits of his reason. In this way law restrained the policy initiatives that could legitimately be pursued to achieve social goals. As Richard Posner writes, "Systems of thought that emphasize hierarchy, tradition, authority, and precedent disvalue the kind of critical inquiry that tests belief and advances knowledge, and as a result, the truths that
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Biuletyn Stowarzyszenia Absolwentów i Przyjaciół Wydziału Prawa Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego
In modern democracies the liberty of the individual is ensured and protected by the state or the government. But it is well-known that restrictions on liberty are institutionalized and the individual is responsible for obeying them. The liberty of the individual and its protection is provided through restrictions. On the other hand, the legal system and the government are the institutions that threaten the liberty of the individual. Mill’s thesis on individual liberty implies the primacy of it and sets out the social conditions in which it will be possible to realize and protect individual liberty. The main theme of his treatise On Liberty is the nature and boundaries of individual liberty, the scope of legitimate interference with individual liberty. In other words, the principle establishes a sufficient basis for the legitimate protection of the individual liberty, i.e. what is a restriction of a right, on the one hand, is at the same time a protection of it. An individual must be...
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