The words are engrained in our national consciousness: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  These inspirational and linguistically beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence justified the American colonies’ break from England.  But they did more than that.  They explained to the world and to history that natural rights formed the basis of civil law and government.  This was the truly revolutionary aspect of that document signed on July 4, 1776.

After the Declaration, the world was never the same.  The legacy of natural rights meant that law and government would no longer legitimately flow from the whims of a monarch.  Tyrants would no longer carry any moral authority.  Human dignity would transcend the interests of the empire. The Declaration and its natural law foundations vaulted the human world into a new orbit of political philosophy, where deprivations of individual dignity could not be convincingly justified by the self-interests of a ruling elite.