Timothy Sandefur > Quotes

“A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time,” wrote Douglass”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Holmes believed that law is nothing more than the commitment to use force in the service of collective norms, which are merely the subjective preferences of a majority of the people. There are no “transcendental” principles of law, because law “does not exist without some definite authority behind it.”74 To suppose that it has any deeper meaning than the ruler’s arbitrary command, he said, is “churning the void in the hope of making cheese.”75 The idea that people have certain rights at all times and in all places is absurd: rights are only what a society’s power-wielders choose to allow. “All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man,” he told a friend, and he meant it.76 His judicial writings were guided by the view that law is only an expression of power in a universe devoid of other meaning.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“This way of seeing things makes it impossible to distinguish free states from tyrannies, just rulers from unjust rulers, or healthy regimes from abusive regimes. In practice, it would mean that whatever political group happens to wield power, by arms or by propaganda, is, ipso facto, legitimate. Yet the whole point of the Declaration and the Constitution was to found a government on something more than accident and force.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative[s],” wrote one Bostonian, “and waked up stark mad abolitionists.”7”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“The profession of political science, he claimed, had “abandoned” the Declaration’s premise “that liberty is a natural right,” and had come to hold that freedom is created by government as a sort of privilege: “rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would “spoil the best nigger in the world,” and “unfit him to be a slave.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“There, all people are seen as born equally free, meaning that each is presumptively at liberty to act, until those who would limit a person’s freedom give good reasons for such limits. This presumption of liberty is not just a rhetorical device or an arbitrary preference for a convenient starting point in philosophical debates. Rather, it makes clear that those who claim the right to rule others have the burden themselves to justify that claim. That is what the right to equal freedom means: just as the person who asserts a claim in any argument has the responsibility to prove that claim, so one cannot be expected to prove he ought to be free.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“to presume that some people are fundamentally entitled to decide how much freedom others should enjoy. What Would It Mean if the State Did Create Freedom? The danger of confusing the state’s protection of prepolitical rights on one hand, with its creation of rights/privileges on the other, becomes clear when we ask whether the state creates, say, a woman’s right not to be raped.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“brings to mind the tribulations of those groups—blacks in the 19th century, women in the 20th, gays in the 21st—who have learned through struggle that freedom is not given, only claimed.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“My cause, first, midst, last, and always,” he wrote, “was and is that of the black man; not because he is black, but because he is a man.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects.”40 Changes”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law

“There was no point in trying to compensate for the crimes of the past, but “the nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past is to do him justice in the present.”19 That meant integrating schools and ending legal barriers to employment and property ownership.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Once slavery was abolished, the core of the changes that followed was found in the Fourteenth Amendment, which for the first time defined the terms of American citizenship and declared that no state could deprive people of their natural rights or the traditional rights inherited through the common law. Yet shortly afterwards, that amendment was crippled by a Supreme Court decision known as The Slaughter-House Cases.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“But to argue, like Filmer, Tribe, Sunstein, and Bork, that government comes first, and that it gives people freedom when it wills, and for its own purposes, is, as Locke concluded, the same as saying “that no man is born free.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“What’s more, as Tom G. Palmer has observed, if rights are only realms of freedom that the state positively enforces, then there would have to be an endless series of government enforcers. One could have a right not to be tortured by the police, for instance, only if there is a secondary police force charged with enforcing that right. But there must then also be a third set of monitors to ensure that the second set faithfully polices the police, and then another layer of monitors over them. Sunstein’s theory would require “an infinite hierarchy of people threatening to punish those lower in the hierarchy. Since there is no infinite hierarchy, we are forced to conclude that [this is] actually . . . an impossibility theorem of rights in the logical form of modus tollens: If there are rights, then there must be an infinite hierarchy of power; there is not an infinite hierarchy of power, therefore there are no rights.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“This way of seeing things makes it impossible to distinguish free states from tyrannies, just rulers from unjust rulers, or healthy regimes from abusive regimes. In practice, it would mean that whatever political group happens to wield power, by arms or by propaganda, is, ipso facto, legitimate. Yet the whole point of the Declaration and the Constitution was to found a government on something more than accident and force. If rights and political legitimacy are created by accident and force, then there is no moral difference between the dictatorship of a military strongman and a free state governed by fair laws; whatever the political authorities choose to call “just” is so, by definition.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“If religion had any effect on his character at all, it made him more cruel and hateful.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“he ruled that a person cannot sue the government because “there can be no legal right as against the authority that makes the law on which the right depends.”78 In another case, Abrams v. United States,79 Holmes wrote a dissenting opinion that many today regard as a classic defense of free speech80—indeed, it originated the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas.”81 But reading the opinion, one soon encounters a chilling line: “Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical.”82 The only reason we do not persecute people, Holmes went on, is because it is good for society to allow debates. Thus, government gives people the privilege of free speech—for its own purposes, not for the individual’s purposes—and it can withdraw that privilege when it chooses.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“Women would then need to resort to the ballot box to request that protection—assuming the majority sees fit to give them the right/privilege to vote.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“politics is then basically an act of will, not of reason.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“Hugh Auld was wise to fear slave literacy. Reading could kindle in a slave a desire for learning and for a personal future, thus undermining slavery’s consistent effort to stamp out any sense of self-worth.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“What we call laws or rights are just arbitrary preferences enforced by violence, in just the same way that “a dog will fight for his bone.”69 A constitution is simply an effort to render that process less violent by subjecting the inevitable clashes to majority vote instead of battle. But in the end, politics is just war by other means.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“If political leaders choose which rights to give citizens, then there must be a caste of leaders who enjoy greater freedom than do the citizens who are the recipients of these “rights.” That is, the rulers must stand on a higher plane from which they can hand down judgments about what rights are to be given to or withheld from the people below.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“The Constitution’s foundation is the Declaration of Independence, and as slavery’s defenders were increasingly forced to reject its principles, and to defend racial inequality and hierarchy as good things, they found it increasingly difficult to maintain allegiance to the Constitution.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“When Patrick Henry warned his colleagues at the Richmond ratification convention that “the language of We the People, instead of We, the States,” signaled “an alarming transition, from a confederacy to a consolidated government,” James Madison coolly answered that this was among the Constitution’s best features.6 The Articles had been based on “the dependent derivative authority of the legislatures of the states,” he said, but the Constitution would draw its authority “from the superior power of the people.”7 Although it did not consolidate the states in every way, the Constitution, once ratified, would create “a government established by the thirteen States of America, not through the intervention of the Legislatures, but by the people at large.”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty

“But it would be more precise to say that the master aimed to transform the slave into an automaton by obliterating his sense of personhood.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Beat and cuff the slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog,” but “give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master.”1”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Attacks on the principles of the Declaration began at an early point in American history. In the four decades before the Civil War, defenders of slavery explicitly rejected it, even calling it, as Senator John Pettit did in 1854, “a self-evident lie.”63 Horrified by this, antislavery politicians rallied to the Declaration. They developed a constitutional interpretation that emphasized liberty and equality, and they denounced slavery as incompatible with the”
― Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty