Other Rights
Custom also plays a role. Implied or unenumerated rights are rights that courts may find to exist even though not expressly guaranteed by written law or custom; one example is the right to privacy in the United States, and the Ninth Amendment explicitly shows that there are other rights that are also protected.
The United States Declaration of Independence says that people have unalienable rights including "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness". It is considered by some that the sole purpose of government is the protection of life, liberty and property. The right to self-defense is used as a defense of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.
Read more about this topic: Civil Rights
Famous quotes containing the word rights:
“Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)