A Legal History of National Security Law and Individual Rights in the United States
Every time I have read the Constitution of the United States—and I have done so several times a year for more than forty years—I have been left with the inescapable impression that the Framers were decidedly more fearful of the pains of a loss of liberty than the ignominy of a loss of security. What has become to us a dichotomy—liberty versus security—was for them a conflation: Securing liberty. I am convinced that securing liberty was the reason they wrote the Constitution.
Which would you choose, to be free or to be secure? State security and personal freedom often run along tense lines with each other, but our Constitution and its philosophical roots clearly bias freedom over safety. In many ways, the first hundred years of American history represented a struggle between various presidential, congressional, and judicial precedents—both good and bad—to arrive at a philosophical and constitutional consistency for ensuring a nation in which individuals are free to acquire security; as freedom is a birthright and security is a good to be acquired. From the Revolution to the fall of the Federalists, to the Civil War and Reconstruction, America’s commitment to personal freedom was tested in the exigencies of war. What are the philosophical roots of the freedom bias?
