Source: https://advocatetanmoy.com/2019/09/16/what-is-personal-liberty/
Timestamp: 2019-10-17 05:06:38
Document Index: 132219829

Matched Legal Cases: ['Art. 21', 'Art. 19', 'Art. 19', 'Art.19', 'Art. 21', 'Art. 2', 'Art 21']

Personal liberty – Advocatetanmoy Law Library
We shall now proceed with the examination of the width, scope and content of the expression “personal liberty” in Art. 21.
Having regard to the terms of Art. 19 (l) (d), we must take it that that expression is used as not to include the right to move about or rather of locomotion. The right to move about being excluded its narrowest interpretation would be that it comprehends, nothing more than freedom from physical restraint or freedom from confinement within the bounds of a prison; in other words, freedom from arrest and detention, from false imprisonment or wrongful confinement. We feel unable to hold that the term was intended to bear only this narrow interpretation but on the other hand consider that “personal liberty” is used in the Article as a compendious term to include within itself all the varieties of rights which go to make up the “personal liberties” of man other than those dealt with in the several clauses of Art. 19 (1). In other words, while Art.19 (l) deals with particular species or attributes of that freedom, “personal liberty” in Art. 21 takes in and comprises the residue. We have already extracted a passage from the judgment of field, J. in Munn vs. Illinois, (1876) 94 US 113 at page No.142 where the learned Judge pointed out that ‘life” in the 5th and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution corresponding to Art. 2, means not merely the right to the continuance of a person’s animal existence, but a right to the possession of each of his organs – his arms and legs etc. We do not entertain any doubt that the word “life” in Art 21 bears the same signification. Is then the word ‘personal liberty’ to be construed as excluding from its purview an invasion on the ‘part of the police of the sanctity of a man’s home and an intrusion into his personal security and his right to sleep which is the normal comfort and a dire necessity for human existence even as an animal ? It might not be inappropriate to refer here to the words of the preamble to the Constitution that it is designed to “assure the dignity of the individual” and therefore of those cherished human values as the means of ensuring his full development and evolution. We are referring, to these objectives of the farmers merely to draw attention to the concepts underlying the Constitution which would point to such vital words as “personal liberty” having to be construed in a reasonable manner and to be attributed that sense which would promote and achieve those objectives and by no means to stretch the meaning of the phrase to square with any pre-conceived notion or doctrinaire constitutional theories Frankfurter J. observed in Wolf vs. Colorado (1948) 338 US 25.