Rights Before the Constitution: The Law That Comes First

Where do our rights actually come from? In this two-lesson course, drawn from a lecture in Divine Mercy University's God, Religion and Civil Governance series, the constitutional scholar Hadley Arkes makes an argument at once historical and deeply personal: the freedoms we cherish do not rest on the words written in a Bill of Rights, but on a moral law that was already in place before any government existed — the law before the law.

Beginning with Chesterton's warning against loving one strand of a whole more than the whole itself, Arkes shows why no single right — not speech, not property, not arms, not privacy — can bear the weight of the whole regime of freedom. He then turns to the freedom long called the first, religion, and recovers what the American Founders and the classical tradition understood: that a duty owed to the Creator precedes civil society, marks the limits of what any state may command, and makes both the person and the government of moral self-restraint stronger, not weaker. Along the way he sets Madison, Plato, James Wilson, and Hamilton against Thomas Hobbes to answer a question that still divides us — are our rights granted by the state, or only secured by it?

The course pairs Arkes's argument with the resources of Catholic anthropology and the psychology of the ordered person, so that a political thesis becomes an invitation to interior formation.