The American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights & the French

Every Indian school child meets the phrase Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and our own Preamble uses all three words. The phrase did not start in Delhi. It was a slogan of the French Revolution, and behind it stood two documents written thirteen years apart on two sides of the Atlantic: the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. What did these documents say, what did they leave out, and why do they still appear in a Human Rights paper in Mumbai? This topic covers the American Declaration, the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration, as the syllabus reads them together.

In two minutes

The American Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776) declared that all men are created equal with unalienable rights; the Bill of Rights (first ten amendments, 1791) turned such claims into limits on the federal government; and the French Declaration (26 August 1789) proclaimed liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression as natural rights of man and citizen.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Human Rights Law on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.