The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversaryof American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it hasnot been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a majorintellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the uniquevalue of their national inheritance.
In the fourth volume of this series, legalscholars and political scientists examine the many ways in which the foundinggeneration understood the “unalienable rights” immortalized by the Declarationof Independence. Although the Declaration described the right to life, liberty,and the pursuit of happiness as a “self-evident” truth, this characterizationbelied the Revolutionary era’s complex discourse on the origins of politicalrights and their role in sustaining a political community.
Delving into these debates reveals how theAmerican Revolution encoded a productive tension between individual rights andcommunal responsibilities at the nation’s founding.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of
National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at
The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at
National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the
New York Times.
Adam J. White is
the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and a senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme
Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin
Scalia Law School's C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative
State.
John Yoo is a nonresident senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of
Law at the University of California, Berkeley; and a visiting fellow at the
Hoover Institution.
Janice Rogers Brown is a lecturer and
senior fellow at the public law and policy program at the University of
California, Berkeley, School of Law. She was a judge on the US Court of Appeals
for the DC Circuit and on the California Supreme Court.
Daniel E. Burns is an associate professor of politics at the
University of Dallas and a visiting fellow at the Civitas Institute at the
University of Texas at Austin.