 Well, first of all, I'd like to welcome all of our visitors who weren't here with us last night or aren't here for the whole week. I'd like to thank Mother Nature for cooperating this evening for dinner. It was very lovely out there. We appreciate that. And it's my pleasure to introduce a man I believe most of you know, Judge Andrew Napolitano. I'm sure a lot of you know him as a long-time legal analyst at Fox News, also a long-time judge in New Jersey. He has been, of course, a tremendous benefactor to the Mises Institute. He serves on our board. He's also been a mentor of sorts for our own Patrick Newman. He was the host of a television show called Freedom Watch from about 2009 to 2012, which may be the single most radically libertarian show ever to air on cable news. It featured guests like Ron Paul and New Rockwell and Tom Woods. And he is, of course, a thoroughgoing Rothbardian, an expert in natural law constitutionalism. He has a new book coming out, which is a tome. I've seen the print of it. It's over 500 pages. I think the footnotes are more than 100 pages alone in addition to it, and I'm sure we're going to hear more about that tonight. So please welcome Judge Andrew Napolitano. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. So one of the more interesting things I did while I was at Fox was not a Fox event. Senator Rand Paul asked me to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the president's war-making powers. The president's war-making powers? Under the Constitution, he has no war-making powers. But basically, Senator Paul wanted a lecture on the separation of powers. The Congress writes the laws. The president enforces the laws. The judiciary interprets them. The Congress declares war. The president wages war. The Congress can't direct the troops. The president can't pick whatever target he wants, or that at least was Madison's theory. A senator not on the committee, who inexplicably claimed he had never seen me on air, came to the committee meeting to grill me, expecting the sort of Sean Hannity the president can do whatever he wants. He can kill whoever he wants argument. And when I finished, this senator said to me the following. See if you know who this is by my ability to imitate his voice. So, Judge Napolitano, let me ask you this. Still employed by Fox News? You have that apperformance? And then Bernie Sanders kissed me. Oh, my God! I had to call the president of Fox immediately. She said, what the hell happened? Bernie Sanders kissed me. What the hell did you do? I gave a lecture on the separation of powers. What the hell is that? No, it's a good thing. It was a good lecture. I did the right thing. Why did you get so close to Bernie Sanders? Why are you telling me this? Because there's a picture out there where Bernie kissing me. I want the Fox PR people to know about it. All right. Two days later, it's the end of the week, I'm driving from New York to my farm and the phone rings. I know immediately who it is because it's 10 zeros on the screen. Judge Napolitano, this is the White House operator I have the president. Now, for better or for worse, I've known him for 35 years. This is the former president, not the present president. Judge, we have a new chef in the White House. He makes pasta. It's the president of the United States. The other night, I'm eating the pasta. I say to Melania, what do you think? She said, I don't know. What do you think? Call your friend the judge. Let him come down here and taste the pasta. So Trump says to me, would you come down and taste the pasta? At that point, remember, I'm in my car, I drive under a bridge. The call dies. But how am I going to call them back? It's 10 zeros. That's not a real legitimate number. He calls back immediately. What the hell happened? Where the hell are you? I said, well, I'm in New Jersey. Where thanks to your buddy, Christie, the infrastructure stinks. He goes, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right. We have more calls dropped from New Jersey than anywhere else. But look, here's the real reason why I'm calling you. How's your new friend Bernie? All right. I didn't write this stuff. I don't know why my name is up there. But to discuss with you the portions of the Declaration of Independence on the Constitution that underscore the origin of human liberty and the efforts of the government to protect it and the efforts of the government to assault it is about seven or eight weeks in law school with about five hours each week discussing this. I'm going to compact that into 45 minutes. And then we'll do some Q&A. And there are, of course, people in this room who know more about this than I do, not the least of whom is my mentor, the great Judge John Denson, a gift to the people of Alabama and to the judiciary of this state and to the Mises. And of course, Dr. David Gordon is here in whatever room he walks into. He's the smartest person there. And since Walter Block is not here, I'm the most libertarian person in the room. All right. We'll start with the Declaration. You know this language. It's iconic. Now, this is Jefferson. This is about 95 percent Jefferson. They had a committee on revision, which they excluded Jefferson from so they could dial back some of his more extreme language. But you can see the appeal to the laws of nature and nature's God when deciding whether or not to separate from another country. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal men endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Today the word is inalienable. Question, is this just Jefferson's musings or did the Congress actually mean that our rights are inalienable? That's not an academic question because if our rights are inalienable, cannot be removed from us as humans, then they can't be removed from us as humans by an executive order or even legislation or even a majority vote of the people. They could only be removed from us if we give them up. A bank robber gives up his right to travel freely because he stole the bank, stole the money from the bank. But if tough times come and the President says, wow, there's no longer a right to travel or closing down the George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel, you can't go from New Jersey to New York, what happened right after 9-11? What happens to my right to travel? Maybe it's not inalienable. When my friend and Notre Dame law school classmate Justice Amy Coney Barrett was being examined by the Senate Judiciary Committee, she answered a question incorrectly. I cut my mouth shut because I didn't want to get more trouble than I'm usually in at Fox. They said to her, is the Declaration of Independence the law? The answer is yes. This is a statute enacted by the Congress. Now it's not a criminal law that you'll go to jail if you're violated, if that's the case, every President and most members of Congress, not the St. John Paul or his successor Thomas Massey, but almost all of them, would have ended up in Congress. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When Jefferson originally wrote this, it was life, liberty, and property was changed to the pursuit of happiness because of the horrors of slavery that Jefferson himself and half the people that would sign this document claimed they owned property in human beings. They're writing their just powers from the consent of the governed. This is the greatest obstacle the government has ever had. Is there anybody in this room who has consented to be governed by the Congress of the United States, by the President of the United States, by the legislature of any state? No. This is a myth. Wasn't at the time, and it was Jefferson appealing to the fact that they didn't ask our consent before they imposed these laws on it. But it's very interesting. All the powers that the government has come from the consent of the governed. What if the governed don't give their consent? We're going to see in another paragraph where Jefferson says, he begins it right here. It's the right of the people to alter and abolish the government when it's destructive of these ends, when it no longer secures their rights. By the way, this doesn't say to secure their safety, it says secure their rights. It's not life, liberty, and safety. It's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to secure our rights. When the government fails to do these things, when it engages in a long train of abuses and usurpations, it's not just a one-shot deal, but it's attempting to reduce people to despotism. It is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security. We therefore claim the right to secede, the right to leave the government. So all of these people that I work with who think that the Civil War was a fight to control the central government forget that the country was born on the right to secede. Alabama can secede from the Union, you can secede from Alabama. That is at least the theory of what Jefferson wrote here. What I skipped is the indictment, the charges against George III and against the parliament. But the most specious of them is the most popular, and that is taxation without representation is tyranny. They didn't want to be represented in the parliament because they would have been outvoted all the time, and then the tax would have been legitimate. That was just their way, Jefferson's way, of rousing up the folks to join this effort which began on July 3rd when they signed this, 1776. We'll drop this for a minute. This NLT with the underline under it is natural law theory, the idea that our rights come from our humanity and not from the government. We'll see language indisputably underscoring that when we get to the Constitution. This P with a circle around it is positivism. Positivism is the opposite of what natural law theory is. Positivism says that the law is whatever the law giver says it is, whether the law giver is Joe Stalin, or the Congress of the United States, or Pope Francis, or whoever the law giver is, positivism says if it's written down that's the law of the land. This is not me. This is non-aggression principle. This is Murray Rothbard, the great Murray Rothbard's modernization of natural law theory. That all aggression is illicit, either direct violent aggression or aggression performed by deception and subterfuge, including when the government does it, especially when the government does it. As we go through all of this, you will see a lot of it will fit here and some of it will fit here. These are the three amigos, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas. Aristotle said we know right from wrong from our knowledge. Augustine said we know right and wrong because it was revealed to us by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Aquinas, the only one to be canonized as a saint, said it's not knowledge, it's not revelation, it's reason. So by exercising our reason, we know what is right and wrong. And only by exercising our reason can we achieve the truth. And we cannot exercise that reason if people, including the government, are aggressing on us. What rights do we know we have? We'll get to them in a second. This is John Locke who influenced TJ and who influenced Madison. The third word of this, I kiddingly, when teaching this to law students would say it's a typographical error, of course it's not, it's in there. It wasn't the people who ratified the Constitution, it was the states that ratified the Constitution. The states established the government, not the people. Madison thought this sounded a little nicer, so they put we the people in there and of course the public school systems have picked up on this as if it were the mother Teresa talking about the blessed Trinity. So it's always people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare. Now if Chuck Schumer were here, he would claim, unfortunately some Republicans too, but no libertarians, that this gives the Congress the right to regulate and spend anyway it wants as long as it helps the general welfare. Supreme Court has said the preamble means nothing. It's just a goal, an aspiration written by Madison. It doesn't separate powers and it doesn't delegate powers. But to do all these things, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, establish the Constitution. We've skipped a lot, but Article I, Section 8 lists the powers of the Congress. There are 17 of them until we get to this. These are the two monsters that you need to know about. The third paragraph is the Commerce Clause. Now this gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the several states, to regulate meant to keep regular, to keep it going, to prevent the states from establishing tariffs and monopolies. So if you made wheelbarrows in New Jersey, you could sell them in Manhattan without having to pay a tariff to the tax collector in Manhattan. That was the purpose of to regulate commerce. But of course Congress has jumped on this to regulate commerce. This is its favorite hook on which to hang its hat to enact any type of regulation, whether it's commercial or not. Look around this room. You will have great difficulty finding something in this room, including the dye that's in the shirt that I'm wearing that produced this navy blue, including the way the legs are configured on the chairs on which you're sitting, including the brightness of these bulbs that is not regulated by Congress, because in Congress's opinion, and the courts have sadly, lamentably gone along with this, if something affects interstate commerce, Congress can regulate it. So if you make a wheelbarrow in southern New Jersey and ship it to Hoboken, still in New Jersey, and ship it across the river to Manhattan, and then ship it north to West Point under to keep regular, Congress can only regulate it while it was crossing the interstate borders to prevent New Jersey from establishing a monopoly and to prevent New York from taxing it. But if you interpret this to mean anything that could affect interstate commerce, then the movement of the wheelbarrow from southern New Jersey to Hoboken can be regulated by the Congress, even though that's intrastate, and the movement from Manhattan up to West Point can be regulated by the Congress, even though that's intrastate. And if you want to take it to the next level, then Congress can regulate the conditions under which the wheelbarrow was manufactured, which is the theory under which Congress can regulate almost anything in the workplace. The most profoundly ridiculous and utterly absurd example of this, and it's an opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is the Federal Appellate Court for New York City, is the regulation of the wages of window washers, because when they went to the top of the Empire State Building, can you guess what's coming? And turned around, they could see New Jersey, and they competed for those jobs because they wanted the view of New Jersey from the top of the Empire State Building. Therefore, that affected interstate commerce, and their wages could be regulated by Congress, and the court upheld it. So you can see how absurd this often gets, and how Madison's use of this innocuous phrase, which meant to keep regular, has been blown grossly out of proportion. This is the necessary and proper clause, sometimes called the elastic clause. It doesn't mean what it says. I wrote a piece for Lou Rockwell the other day called, does the Constitution mean what it says? Well, the answer to that is no, the Constitution doesn't mean what it says. We know that because it doesn't mean necessary. We know that because the opinion interpreting this says, well, and it has to do with something you're studying this week, it's the idea of a central bank regulating the economy. So the challenge here is to the second national bank of the United States. The case is called McCulloch versus Maryland. The state of Maryland decided, how I wish we could still do this, that the state would tax a federal institution in the state, the federal bank, and the challenge goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and the argument is, well, there's nothing in one through 17, I've only given you three in 18, which says establish a bank. And the big government chief justice, John Marshall, says, well, look, it doesn't mean absolutely necessary because the word absolutely isn't in there. So necessary and proper doesn't mean necessary and proper, it just means needful or helpful. So Congress can do whatever is helpful to its other powers. And from that decision, as well as the absurdities like the window washers, we have almost a general legislature that can regulate any event, tax any activity, claim the power to dominate almost anything that it wishes. I don't want to tell you when this happened because you have to guess as to who orchestrated this, so blow your mind. The issue is, can Congress regulate the blood alcohol content in your veins when you're driving? Can Congress regulate DWI? Even Congress acknowledged that it couldn't regulate DWI. So in order to get around that, it engaged in bribery because one of the clauses that I don't have time to go through here is the spending power, which lets Congress spend money on anything it wants. So Congress goes to the states and says, we will pay you whatever it costs to repave the federal highways in your states. If you keep the speed limit below 55, and if you keep the blood alcohol content, minimal blood alcohol content for DWI, I'm pointing to my arm, this is where they used to take the blood from when they did this on the side of the road, thanks be to God they don't do it on the side of the road anymore. And if you lower that to .08, .08 a person my age and my height, it's a beer and a half. It's absurd, but that's what Congress wanted to do. Is that an act of bribery? Can you go to the legislature of the state of New Jersey or the state of Alabama and say, here's $100 million? Now enact legislation that I want? Well, the state of South Dakota said that. We'll take your 100 million, you can repave our roads, we'll decide what our DWI laws are, by the way, we don't have speed limits on the federal highways in South Dakota. What, left wing pinko creep orchestrated this? Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court of course, went along with the feds and said, you don't want the conditions, don't take the money. Well, that's ridiculous. The states always take the money because the federal government can print money and the state constitutions prohibit them from going into debt other than a bond secured by real estate. The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended. This is the right, I wrote a piece for Lou last week on this. This is the right of every person confined by the government to compel the government to justify the confinement. Theoretically, they can't lock you up and throw away the key. Theoretically, they must bring you before a neutral federal judge and justify to that judge the basis for your confinement. They want to send you to Cuba in Guantanamo Bay where someone is there for speaking against the United States government in Yemen for 17 years, yet to have a document filed against him. And the courts are now going to decide, what are we going to do with him? You just can't do this. The general rule is 48 hours. Within 48 hours of arrest, you have the right to exercise this writ, which basically means bring me the body, or who has the body? Bring the body of the defendant into the courtroom and justify his confinement. No bill of attainder or ex post facto law should be passed. A bill of attainder is a statute that makes something a crime in the past. So a law is enacted in July that made an event illegal in January when you did it even though at the time you did this thing in January it wasn't illegal. Why is this in here because the kings did that and the parliament did that all the time to their adversaries? That theoretically is prohibited by this. I say theoretically because Bill Clinton and Al Gore raised income tax rates retroactively. You paid income taxes on money that you earned before Bill was president on the rate that they enacted passed by one vote, Gore breaking the tie in the Senate challenged all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court says no, this only means criminal statutes. Do you see criminal in there? It says no bill of attainder, which is a retroactive statute. The Supreme Court said no, it only prevents crimes. You can raise taxes retroactively all you want. Some of the stuff we don't need to go into because the states are not in the business of granting titles of nobility, except for New York, which has a king named Cuomo. But I underlined here, no state shall pass any bill or law impairing the obligation of contracts. So if I want to hire you to represent me in a courtroom and we sign a contract and I pay you to do it and you agree to do it, the state will interfere with that contract. And maybe you have, because you haven't passed their test which satisfies them that you're good enough to do this work. And by the way, well, how can the state stop evictions for not paying rent if they're not allowed to impair the obligation of contract? How can the state stop foreclosures if they're not allowed to impair the obligation of contract? Because again, the court has said, this doesn't really mean the obligation of contract. As long as whatever the state does to interfere with the contract is for the common good or eventually restores the obligation, the state can do it. So if the state wants to say to tenants who can't pay their rent, don't worry, you can't be evicted for five years. As long as it's a finite end of that five years, as absurd as that sounds. And even though it's not here in writing, that's what this has come to mean. This is the only crime defined in the Constitution. And it is defined in the Constitution because this was the British King's favorite crime, Henry VIII once decreed that you were guilty of high treason. If you looked him in the eye without permission, of course the penalty for high treason was a slow and horrific death. But in order to prevent that, Madison and company, treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war. What's that word? Them. Okay Abe Lincoln, and the foremost Lincoln scholar in the United States is in this room, the great Professor Tom Di Lorenzo. You're waging war against them Abe, that's treason. Or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two eyewitnesses to the same overt act or confession in open court. This was intended to deter a torture and people confessing under torture. Now we get to the Bill of Rights. Obviously there is so much here that I had to cut out like the separation of powers, the thing that Bernie liked that I gave that testimony about. So what's the most important word here? Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. I'm gonna repeat it. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. I have argued this is the most important word, the freedom of speech. And there's some evidence of debate in 1787 of the Constitutional, excuse me. In Congress in 1791, when the House of Representatives Committee chaired by little Jimmy, the nickname for James Madison. So if he's in heaven, and if I get to go there, I can't wait to stand next to him. Because I will look like Shaquille O'Neal next to little Jimmy. He was all of four foot eight, four foot nine, four foot ten. Highest GPA of anybody that ever graduated from Princeton. I'll tell you something he did while he was an undergraduate there, which was truly brilliant in a couple of minutes. And not all that he did was good, as we know. If you've read Professor Newman's construction of volume five of Conceived in Liberty. Not only is Professor Newman a truly gifted economist and a brilliant historian, he's also an expert of Murray Rothbard's handwriting. Because he constructed this book, I know it because I had to read the book. He constructed this book from Murray's notes. You will see how duplicitous the gang was that wrote all this stuff. But the reason this is the most important word is because it emphasizes its pre-existence, the freedom of speech. This doesn't say Congress shall grant freedom of speech. It says Congress shall not abridge or infringe upon freedom of speech. So if Congress didn't grant it, where did it come from? It comes from our humanity. So right off the bat, in the First Amendment, we see hints. Not directly until we get to Amendment 9 of the recognition of natural rights, rights coming from our humanity. We all know what this is. This is not the right to shoot deer. This is the right to shoot tyrants when they take over the government and suppress your liberty. How was the country born? In an act of bloody secession against whom? A tyrant. One tyrant, 3,000 miles away. I want you to think about this for the rest of this lecture and the rest of this week. In five years, we will be 250 years old, the American government. Is the experiment a failure or is the experiment a success? As we proceed through history, does freedom increase or does the power of the government increase? And we trade one tyrant, 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants, a mile away? You know what the answers to these questions are. And that's why this is there. Not until 2008 did my late great friend, Nino Scalia, muster a majority on the Supreme Court to say, this is a personal, individual, pre-political right. What does pre-political mean? Right there. It comes from your humanity, it's a natural right. Nino, why'd you say pre-political? Why didn't you say natural? Natural law sounds too Catholic and I had to get a majority on the court. And two of them were not Catholic so they twisted my arm to put in pre-political rather than natural. Pre-political, fundamental, constitutional, natural. They all mean the same thing, which is not from the government, from our humanity. This is an extension of the right to self-defense. You're about to punch me in the nose, I can punch you. And the brilliance of what Scalia wrote is also, what level of arms can you possess? Answer, the same level as the bad guys. And ready for this, agents of the government, who can own the same arms for self-defense? Theoretically, under this opinion as what the government owns. Well, the reason we have this is because, God, that's a crazy story. The king was looking for money, he enacted the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act said you had to have a stamp bearing the king's image and every piece of paper in your possession, financial documents, personal correspondence, books, even a poster you're gonna nail to a tree. How did the king know, 3,000 miles away, if you had these documents in your house, the answer, the Ritz of Assistance Act, which let soldiers knock on the door and come into your house, ostensibly look over the stamps. Sometimes they threw you out and they took over the house. And they lived there for as long as they wanted, which is why we have the Third Amendment. Not just a revolutionary era issue, it happens almost every day. When the police decide they need your real estate for some reason. Very little litigation on this, the courts don't wanna hear about it. The quintessentially American right, characterized by Lewis Brandeis, Justice Brandeis, has the right to be left alone. The right of the people to be secure in their person's houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. And no warrants shall issue but on probable cause, supported by oath, particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. After the definition of treason, this is the most precise and specific language in the Constitution because the British government had a history of general warrants. And a general warrant basically authorized the bearer of the warrant to search where he wished and seized whatever he found. This says, A, no warrants except probable cause, which means probable cause of crime. B, all searches and seizures are unreasonable unless by a warrant. And C, it must particularly describe the place to be searched or the persons or things to be seized. Wait a minute, wait a minute. What about the NSA? Well, they seize everything. They seize the contents of our iPhones. Where's the warrant that they got in order to do that? So I was once interrogating Justice Scalia at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It's not a Fox event. This was a Brooklyn law school event when I was teaching there. There were 2,500 people there. It was just the two of us on the set. He goes, well, you know, Judge Laplacada, you're a freak for the natural law. Not everything is natural law. The Fourth Amendment is limited to persons, houses, papers, and effects. Well, what are you telling me? It only protects persons, houses, papers, and effects. That's what it says. Nino, what's this? Well, it's an iPhone. What's in there? Computer chip, where are you going with this? Justice Scalia is a computer chip and effect. I better not answer that. I think the case is coming our way. The case hasn't gotten there yet. Who knows if it ever will get there? You know, the NSA captures every keystroke, even what you think you've deleted. Every piece of data transmitted into the US, out of the US, and within the US, everything, medical, financial, legal, absolutely, without a warrant. In my years on the bench, you rotated warrant duty. Now, nobody wanted it because they knocked on your door three in the morning. Police will call you from the roadside. Here's what I have. Here's what I need. So these guys came into my apartment. The police did at three in the morning and wanted me to sign a warrant forcibly to remove blood from somebody's arm against his will. They didn't want to come to my home because I knew there was no way in heaven or earth I was going to sign this thing. But at least they didn't do it. At least they followed the law, which was go to the duty judge, whoever's on duty, poor soul on duty at three in the morning, and ask him for a warrant. A friend of mine issued a warrant from the back of a motorcycle. As long as the judge is satisfied that there's probable cause of crime, the judge will issue the warrant. It's the general warrant. The absence of probable cause. The mass suspicionless surveillance that is a profound violation of the Fourth Amendment and the right to be left alone. There's a lot to unpack in here. But for our purposes, it's this. Nor no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Does this ring a bell? Remember the last time we saw this, it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At this point, and it's 1791, the happiness language was written in 1776, they decided to put property in here. So the government cannot deprive someone of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And the government can't take private property for public use without just compensation. Suppose the government imposes a tax on the property that's so high that you can't use the property for the purpose for which you bought it. Is that a taking? The answer is, it is not a taking. Because the government almost always gets away with this. I was trying a takings case. So the government needs property. When the government wants property, it takes it, and then the trial occurs. So by the time the trial occurs, the government has the property. You've lost the property. The issue is, is it for public use, and what's the just compensation? So they're building a highway in northern New Jersey, and a farmer and his wife are out of the country for two years. They come back after two years, and in their field is a mountain 1,000 feet high. And the mountain is filled with the earth that the state excavated in order to build the highway. The farmer didn't know anything about it, because he didn't get any of the notices, because he was living in Europe for a year, and none of the notices came to him. Unfortunately for the state, the case was assigned to me for trial. And the state's argument was, we didn't really diminish the value of his property, because if you climb to the top of that property, this is way out in the sticks where I live, up by the Delaware River. This is 78 miles from New York City. If you climb to the top of that property on a clear day, you can see New York. Therefore, we made the property more valuable by putting this mountain in his backyard. And I said, well, that is so absurd. I really don't think you should tell that to the jury. And if you want to tell it to the jury, I'm not going to let you tell it. Eventually settled the case, and they paid this guy for it because of this language here. But the controversial one is this. So the Biden administration can't decide what this means. No person. Does it mean no American person? Or does it mean what it says? No person. So when the Biden Justice Department had to tell the court what it thought it meant, it punted and remained mute. And now the court will decide. Well, if the Constitution means what it says, it means no person. What's the significance of this? Well, wherever the government goes, the Constitution goes with it. Otherwise, the government could take you or me or, God forbid, Lou Rockwell to Guantanamo Bay and just let us sit there like this guy that's been there for 17 years. This requires the analysis of due process within a reasonable period of time. What's due process? Notice of hearing, notice of charges in writing, hearing before a fair and neutral judge and jury, the right to appeal an adverse decision before another panel of judges. The Fifth Amendment, of course, also prohibits a person from being tried more than once, nor subject to the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life for a limb. I chuckled because, again, the British kings, if you were acquitted by a jury, they tried again before another jury. If you were acquitted by that jury, they tried it for the same crime a third time before a third jury until you gave up or until you got a conviction. This, of course, prohibits that, nor shall any person be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. In theory, this prohibits torture. Don't ask some of the people who've been arrested in the Capitol building on January 8th and haven't seen the light of day since then if this prohibits torture. Don't ask of being locked in a box with no window and not seeing any other human being for weeks at a time constitutes torture. This says you get a speedy trial, a public trial. Of course, all these NSA decisions aren't secret, but this is theoretically says a public trial. You're entitled to be informed of the nature of the charges against you. You can subpoena people to testify on your behalf. The accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial. What does that mean? Well, a speedy trial is not 17 years. It's something between 0 and 17, because this character at Guantanamo Bay, the government says, well, we don't have to provide him with a trial because we haven't charged him. And because we haven't charged him bingo, he's not accused. So he's not one of these people entitled to a speedy and public trial. You could see, I mean Orwell warned us about this. You know this, how the twisting and tormenting of words can be used to twist and torment human freedom. Well, this has obviously changed. You can get a jury if you're suing for $20. But it does say that once a jury has found a fact, the judges who don't like what the jury found can't change it. Again, theoretically, there are about 15 exceptions to that, which I won't go through now. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. What about waterboarding? What about all the things that the CIA has done to people, to get them to tell the CIA what it wants to hear? Is that a cruel and unusual punishment? What do you think the government says? Well, because it happened before trial and before conviction, it's not a punishment. Therefore, we can do whatever we want. Does the Constitution mean what it says? Or does it mean whatever the government can persuade the courts into saying it means? I'm going to stop at this juncture for a minute. Jeff made some nice comments about my book. It's not yet published, although it's done. David Gordon has read it. Patrick Newman doesn't know it yet, but he's about to read it. It's 600 pages of 2,000 footnotes. The 2,000 footnotes are the universe of everything written on natural law theory. Here's the quandary that the House of Representatives committee chaired by little Jimmy had in 1791. If we list all these rights, religion, speech, press, travel, self-defense, privacy, speedy trial, does that mean that the rights that we failed to list are not protected? So should we list any of them? Well, we've got to list them. We have to list them because five of the 13 states said that they would not ratify the Constitution if we didn't produce a bill of rights in a reasonable period of time. And those 13 states might see seed. And then our grand design of planning the central economy and making ourselves and our banker friend super rich. Gee, do you think that happened? That grand design will never happen. So we've got to come up with the bill of rights. But what do we do about the rights that are too numerous to enumerate? Madison's genius. The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. This is the hook on which the drafters hung their natural law theory non-aggression principle John Locke, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas hat. That there are other rights retained by the people. That the government shall not deny or disparage to lawyers. Shall means must. So if the government shall not do something, it must not do something. This is the lynchpin of human liberty unenumerated in the previous eight amendments. The book I wrote is not about the 9th Amendment. There's a lot about the 9th Amendment in there. But there's a book by Professor Randy Barnett, B-A-R-N-A-T-T, who's the he's one of us. He's at Georgetown Law School, the poor thing. He's the only one there that thinks right. Who's the guru on the 9th Amendment, if you're really interested in this, the Forgotten Amendment? Well, the 10th was forgotten for 200 years. It basically says, power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved. Reserved. What does that mean? That means that those states have the rights to begin with, go all the way back to we the people. It should have said we the states because the states kept what they did not delegate away. That's basically what this means. This was mocked by the New Deal. It was mocked by Eisenhower. It was mocked by Republicans. It was mocked by Lincoln. It wasn't until Justice Clarence Thomas got on the Supreme Court that the scholarship about the 10th Amendment began to be revived. Hey, there really are areas of human behavior like the thickness of the legs on this chair and how much indigo dye is in the t-shirt that were not delegated by the states to the Constitution or to the federal government and therefore are reserved to the states. So from in the after early 1990s, there is this revival of 10th Amendment jurisprudence which occasionally gets five or six votes on the Supreme Court. I throw up the 14th Amendment for you not to get into the naturalization argument but get into the due process analysis. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of, well, wait a minute, we just saw that. Yes, we just saw it. Where did we see it? We saw it in the 5th Amendment. What level of government does the 5th Amendment regulate? The federal government. What level of government does this regulate? The states, no state shall. So this amendment, its enactment was tortuous. I don't believe it was ever validly enacted. Ohio and New Jersey rescinded their ratifications of it after they ratified it and Congress counted those ratifications as a ratification anyway. Nevertheless, it has been the law of the land since 1868 and it prohibits the states from denying life, liberty or property without due process of law just as the 5th Amendment does the same for the federal government. So the objective is there are some judicial activists who are activists in favor of big government. There are other judicial activists, do you know any, who when they were on the bench were activists in favor of human liberty? Because human liberty is the default position. Liberty is in our nature. What is government? It is the negation of liberty. Some liberties should be negated. Your right to struggle made a death should be negated. But most liberties, all liberties that don't harm anybody else should not be negated but the government negates them anyway. Look, I said earlier, in my opinion, the 244 year experiment has not gone well. Jefferson predicted shortly before he died that in the long run, liberty would decrease and order would increase. And again, Patrick Newman has just written this book about liberty versus order and Murray Rothbard argued for years, as did Van Mises, that the lesson of human history is personal liberty versus governmental power. When I hope, when I die, and I'm a lot older than everybody in this room, except for a few people's names I won't mention. Right? My dear friend, when I die, I will die in my bed faithful to first principles surrounded by the people who love me. But not all of you will have that luxury. Some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government prison and some of you will die faithful to first principles in a government town square to the sound of the government's trumpets blaring. When the time comes to make those awful decisions, you will know what to do. Because freedom lies in the human heart, but it must do more than just lie there. Thank you and God bless you.