Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
Page Number: 86

Cite as:  576 U. S. ____ (2015) 

9 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

Hyneman  &  D.  Lutz,  American  Political  Writing  During 
the Founding Era 1760–1805, pp. 100, 308, 385 (1983). 

The  founding-era  idea  of  civil  liberty  as  natural  liberty 
constrained by human law necessarily involved only those
freedoms  that  existed  outside  of  government.    See  Ham-
burger,  Natural  Rights,  Natural  Law,  and  American 
Constitutions, 102 Yale L. J. 907, 918–919 (1993).  As one 
later  commentator  observed,  “[L]iberty  in  the  eighteenth
century was thought of much more in relation to ‘negative
liberty’;  that  is,  freedom  from,  not  freedom  to,  freedom 
from a number of social and political evils, including arbi-
trary government power.”  J. Reid, The Concept of Liberty
in  the  Age  of  the  American  Revolution  56  (1988).    Or  as 
one scholar put it in 1776, “[T]he common idea of liberty is 
merely  negative,  and  is  only  the  absence  of  restraint.”  R. 
Hey, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty and the
Principles of Government §13, p. 8 (1776) (Hey).  When the 
colonists described laws that would infringe their liberties, 
they discussed laws that would prohibit individuals “from 
walking  in  the  streets  and  highways  on  certain  saints 
days,  or  from  being  abroad  after  a  certain  time  in  the 
evening, or . . . restrain [them] from working up and man-
ufacturing  materials  of  [their]  own  growth.”    Downer,  A 
Discourse  at  the  Dedication  of  the  Tree  of  Liberty,  in  1 
Hyneman, supra, at 101.  Each of those examples involved
freedoms that existed outside of government. 

B 
Whether  we  define  “liberty”  as  locomotion  or  freedom 
from  governmental  action  more  broadly,  petitioners  have 
in no way been deprived of it.

Petitioners  cannot  claim,  under  the  most  plausible 
definition  of  “liberty,”  that  they  have  been  imprisoned  or 
physically  restrained  by  the  States  for  participating  in
same-sex  relationships.  To  the  contrary,  they  have  been
able to cohabitate and raise their children in peace.  They