Pros And Cons Of The Declaration Of Independence

The United States is a nation built upon law, democracy, and principles derived from rights. Like anything man-made, there are flaws to be found in this nation, yet also strengths. Since the very first days of the Declaration of Independence’s effects on the colonies to the modern era we live in today, these successes and failures have defined society’s standards. While recently the United States has moved closer to the ideals of the Social Contract and Natural Rights, it has also moved further from the guiding Rule of Law. The Social Contract is the concept where we the people give up some of our rights to the government in exchange for protection and security from them. One important way the United States moves closer towards the Social

This means that no one should be specifically murdered, enslaved, or stolen from. To this ideal of Natural Rights, the United States excels in several ways. The first is through the use of patents and copyrights. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says on their website, uspto.gov, that “a patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the USPTO.” No one is allowed to steal or use the work of others without consent, protecting our right to property, and by extension liberty through the idea of personal privacy. Another way the U.S. upholds our Natural Rights is through the establishment of guidance counselors in schools and our ability to choose any career path. These federally required guidance counselors allow students to explore their future career options and to follow their dreams. Everyone is free to choose their own occupational path, this being a characteristic of our right to life, and of the liberty to live it how we choose. Through their establishment of measures to protect our personal property, privacy, and custom livelihoods, the United States dutifully ensures the security of our Natural

Where the U.S. tends to do well with the preservation of the Social Contract and our Natural Rights, there are evident holes in the upholding of the Rule of Law. The largest of these holes is judicial bias. As described in the UCONN School of Law’s website, libguides.law.uconn.edu, “although judges are supposed to be impartial, as they promise in their oath… they are human and do harbor implicit biases influenced by their identity and experiences.” The school explains that, since judges use more intuition “than deliberative judging,” their implicit biases are applied to cases. Several times, such as in the case of Justin Bieber’s dropped 2014 DUI case (CNN.com), celebrities and other prominent figures have had their charges eased or even dropped through bias, whereas in the case of a regular citizen, the charges would have been the status quo. In a society and government where the Rule of Law should be a guiding law of the land, such outliers of bias and inequality show a definite pull away from the ideal; the United States does indeed struggle to uphold the principle of the Rule of Law in such a