The very reason for the American experiment was -- and is -- to establish the principle and the reality that no man or government may alienate a person's life, liberty or pursuit of happiness.
Anyone who has experienced the expectation of the imminent loss of any of those conditions knows profoundly their value -- and thus the value of our form of government, which exists to protect those rights.
It does not take a legal scholar to know that. But it could be said that no one can rightly be called an American legal scholar who does not understand that the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the animating purposes of all our laws -- of the law. They are the soul of our Constitution. Without those rights, the body of law is a corpse -- a soulless, purposeless, manipulable, disposable, dead, material thing. If Ms. Kagan does not know that, then she knows nothing of our law.
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