Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 4.djvu/384

368 368 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. At bottom, however, the word '* liberty," used in its broadest and most general sense, means and includes all those great rights, remedies, and guarantees which a human being has in a given state of society or under a given government, and that is the way it was used by our ancestors, who entitled their bill of rights a Absolute Rights of Individuals.^ Taken in this sense, as being synonymous with civil or social rights, as distinguished from freedom of the person, of speech, and of the press; of religious freedom ; of petition ; of discussion ; of marriage ; of taking part in the government, and many others. All such rights are — with certain limitations, which make them truly social or civil rights, and apart from which the above terms cannot be under- stood — enjoyed in this country, as a matter of fact, whether or not they are all declared in our constitutional law. The question with which we are at present concerned, however, is the latter, or rather, is the question as to how many of the above-mentioned rights are included under a particular term in a particular clause in our most fundamental law. In the Federal Constitution and in the constitutions of at least twenty-eight of our States there are clauses which in substance declare that no person shall be deprived of *' life, liberty, or property (sometimes 'estate'), but by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land." In some constitutions the same rights are first declared in the ancient terms of the prototype of these clauses (to be noticed later), and are then summarized as above; and in some we find instead of ''judgment of his peers or law of the land," the expression " due course (or ' process ') of law ; " but it is well settled that " due process of law " and " law of the land " are identical in meaning,^ and the other variations are not important, because they do not affect the identity or his- tory of the clause. A somewhat similar combination of terms occurs in other places in several of our constitutions, where perhaps the term " liberty " is used in a different sense.^ At present, however, we are concerned with it as it is used in this 1 See also Lieber on Civil Liberty. 2 I Cooley's Blackstone, 135, n. 8 See, for example, the Constitution of Massachusetts, which.following the Declaration of Independence, declares that all men have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
 * body of liberties," and by Blackstone, in his chapter on the
 * natural" rights, American hberty includes the rights of life; of