5.1: Introduction

The Statue of Liberty guards New York Harbor, where she has stood since 1886.

Liberty is arguably the most cherished American value. It features prominently in our Declaration of Independence (“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”), our Constitution (“the Blessings of Liberty”), our Pledge of Allegiance (“liberty and justice for all”), and our National Anthem (“land of the free”). The tiniest copper penny (liberty has been minted on every U.S. coin in circulation since 1792) and the giant copper statue in New York Harbor (whose official name is Liberty Enlightening the World) testify to its importance.

Liberty to Americans is more than just a word or symbol. We are fiercely protective of our liberties, also called freedoms or rights. A right is a privilege to which a person is entitled by virtue of who he or she is. Americans often refer to their rights as God-given, inalienable, or natural. Whether you believe these rights were actually given by God—“endowed by their Creator,” in the words of the Declaration of Independence—is beside the point, which is that rights are not simply permissions granted by the government. If they were, the government could in principle revoke them at any point. Rather, the rights we have are inherent in our human nature and citizenship, and the government cannot take them away from us without a very good reason.

Rights are controversial because they must be limited for society to function. If my rights to do things were unlimited, they would interfere with your rights to not have things done to you. As philosopher Zechariah Chafee put it, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” To protect the rights we treasure most, the government must restrict other rights that would interfere with them.

The question of how rights should be limited becomes especially contentious when applied to civil liberties. A civil liberty is a protection from government overreach so fundamental that it is considered essential to the functioning of a liberal (meaning “free”) democracy. The United States aspires and purports to be a liberal democracy, so it must take care not to unnecessarily curtail civil liberties. But civil liberties, like all rights, are not absolute. Some curtailment will always be necessary, lest anarchy reign.

The Constitution does not always provide clear guidance on which civil liberties Americans have and how far they extend. As a result, America’s history of rights is a long and contested one, beginning before its independence and continuing to the present. The rights afforded to American citizens have been expanded, contracted, refined, and redefined many times in the United States’ quest to determine how best to live up to its hallowed value of liberty.