Ordered Liberty is a concept, according to which the individual freedom can be limited for the sake of social order. To provide the widest freedom to the entire society, the state has to restrain the personal freedoms of every society member. This principle puts the common good above the personal liberty. Ordered Liberty is an attempt to find a balance between principles of freedom, social order, and justice. The governments, based only on the order without freedom or justice, are tyrannies. The lack of order, on the other hand, leads to the anarchy. A political theorist, Russel Kirk pointed out that these three principles (freedom, justice, and order) are the basis of the American policy. Finding a balance between them is crucial for the building of the harmonized society.
Popular sovereignty is a term that can be applied to two different principles. In the first case, it means that the authority and power of the government are approved and sustained by the people of the state. In other words, the state relies on the vox populi – ‘the voice of the people’. People are the final authority of the political decision-making. The second meaning developed in the antebellum years and concerned the question of legitimizing of the slave system. Popular Sovereignty (in this case was also called Squatter Sovereignty) presupposed the right of the federal territories to decide for themselves, whether they accept the slavery or not. The position of every state was determined by the public vote.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a name of legal principle. According to it, the child, born in the slave colony, inherits the status of its mother, even though the father of the child was a free man. It means that a child born by a free woman considered as a free, and child of a slave woman automatically became a slave. In 1662 this doctrine replaced the English common law, according to which a child gets a status of its father because a father is a head of a marital unit. Partus was a direct toughening of the terms for the slaves’ manumissions and had two consequences for the slaves. Firstly, it guaranteed the slave status passing from generation to generation, regardless of a child’s father status. Secondly, a white man, who raped a colored woman, was legally not responsible for the child. This law helped to maintain a slavery system and gave white men insurance from holding responsibility for their colored children.
Ordered liberty is the concept that freedom may be limited by the need for order in society. Russel Kirk, an American political theorist, wrote in The American Cause a chapter entitled “Ordered Liberty” in which he described it as a balance between justice, order, and freedom. In a government with ordered liberty, “interests are balanced and harmonized by good laws…. Our American polity is a regime of ordered liberty, designed to give justice and order and freedom all their due recognition and part.” This concept has been used in interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment, asking if the state's action is inconsistent with the concept of ordered liberty.
Popular sovereignty is the idea that the authority of a government comes from the consent of the people. Theoretically, the people have the final say in government decisions. However, this principle does not necessarily reflect a political reality. Historically, the principle of popular sovereignty was applied to justify the American Revolution. In the 1850s the principle was invoked by slavery proponents in the Bleeding Kansas conflict.
The legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrem literally means “that which is brought forth follows the womb.” When the doctrine was first used in the British colonies, it was a departure from English common law that determined a child’s status according to the condition of the father. Partus established that a child’s status as a slave or free person depended upon the status of the mother. Labor shortages and the desire to maintain a large number of slaves are likely causes for this legal doctrine. An effect was to perpetuate the rape of slave women by white men who would not have to fear legal responsibility for their illegitimate mixed-race children. Partus helped maintain the system of African American slavery from one generation to the next.
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