Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
Page Number: 84.0

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

7 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

Court’s  earliest  Fourteenth  Amendment  decisions  appear
to interpret the Clause as using “liberty” to mean freedom
from physical restraint.  In Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113 
(1877), for example, the Court recognized the relationship 
between  the  two  Due  Process  Clauses  and  Magna  Carta, 
see  id.,  at  123–124,  and  implicitly  rejected  the  dissent’s 
argument  that  “ ‘liberty’ ”  encompassed  “something  more 
. . .  than  mere  freedom  from  physical  restraint  or  the 
bounds of a prison,” id., at 142 (Field, J., dissenting).  That 
the  Court  appears  to  have  lost  its  way  in  more  recent
years does not justify deviating from the original meaning
of the Clauses. 

2 
Even  assuming  that  the  “liberty”  in  those  Clauses  en-
compasses  something  more  than  freedom  from  physical
restraint, it would not include the types of rights claimed
by  the  majority.    In  the  American  legal  tradition,  liberty
has  long  been  understood  as  individual  freedom  from 
governmental  action,  not  as  a  right  to  a  particular  gov-
ernmental entitlement. 

The  founding-era  understanding  of  liberty  was  heavily 
influenced  by  John  Locke,  whose  writings  “on  natural 
rights and  on the social and governmental contract”  were 
cited “[i]n pamphlet after pamphlet” by American writers.
B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolu-
tion 27 (1967).  Locke described men as existing in a state
of nature, possessed of the “perfect freedom to order their 
actions  and  dispose  of  their  possessions  and  persons  as
they  think  fit,  within  the  bounds  of  the  law  of  nature, 
without  asking  leave,  or  depending  upon  the  will  of  any 
other  man.”  J.  Locke,  Second  Treatise  of  Civil  Govern-
ment,  §4,  p.  4  (J.  Gough  ed.  1947)  (Locke).  Because  that 
state  of  nature  left  men  insecure  in  their  persons  and
property,  they  entered  civil  society,  trading  a  portion  of 
their natural liberty for an increase in their security.  See