As we celebrate our country's 250th anniversary, it seems fitting to remember our founding fathers were dreamers, attempting to create a foundation that would last a new nation for as long as they could imagine. They believed in both natural law (higher, often moral law protecting natural rights) and positive law (human-created legal boundaries contained in constitutions, common law, equity law, etc.), so exploring how our founders' legal dreams outlived the dreamers seems worthy.

When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence for his other committee members to read, he wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Note: Jefferson wrote "inalienable," but it was printed as "unalienable," and thus it has remained.

These were examples of our natural rights, i.e., those that could be discovered through reason; however, our founding fathers weren't naïve enough to think we could gain our independence and then live by our natural rights in a state of nature. Instead, the founders remembered that in his 1651 book "Leviathan," Enlightenment........

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