Every year during the first week of May we celebrate Law Day. This year's theme is "Celebrate Your Freedom". As we recognize this Law Day 2000 and mark the new millennium, it is appropriate that we reflect upon our country's and territory's accomplishments and gaze ahead to the future. Looking back more than 200 years ago, we see a nation founded by dreamers and who's citizens wanted something better than the status quo. Our country's founders cherished diversity because they themselves were different. They created a democratic government built on the freedoms that we still enjoy today:
* Freedom to say what we believe.
* Freedom to choose how we worship .
* Freedom to criticize our government.
Today, America remains a beacon for people around the world who dream of freedom and a better life. The United States, with all its flaws and imperfections, is still the best hope for democracy and diversity.
"Freedom" is a word of deep reverence for Americans and particularly for Virgin Islanders. But what exactly do we mean by it and how are our freedoms protected by law? Freedom House, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening free societies, analyzes the world's countries every year to determine the extent of freedom around the world. The criteria this group uses for its analysis are a helpful tool in our defining freedom, and showing how it is impossible without the protections of the law.
In the category of "political rights," for example, the group's criteria include, among others:
* Free and fair elections.
* Fair electoral laws, equal campaigning opportunities, fair polling and honest tabulation of votes.
* The ability to endow elected representatives with real power.
All of these criteria are addressed by the United States Constitution, our Virgin Islands Revised Organic Act and our statutory laws. More than half the amendments to the Constitution passed since the Bill of Rights deal with qualifications to vote (always extending the franchise) and procedures for electing public officials. In addition to these constitutional provisions, thousands of territorial and federal laws regulate elections, to guard against arbitrary abuses of power. Of course, the Constitution as a whole is a device for assuring that a free people can govern themselves — it's a kind of blueprint for democratic power — including an independent court system that can assure that these rights are enforced.
Political rights aren't the only freedoms. Freedom House's checklist for civil liberties provides another way for measuring freedom–and the need for a legal system that can protect it. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is our way of protecting a host of civil liberties identified by Freedom House as crucial components of freedom:
* Free and independent media.
* Open public discussion.
* Freedom of assembly.
* Free religious institutions and free religious expression.
The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees another of the group's building blocks of freedom-equality under law and access to an independent, nondiscriminatory judiciary. The due process amendments of the Bill of Rights address another civil liberties criterion–protection from unjustified imprisonment, exile or torture. The protections of private property embodied in the Constitution and protected through numerous laws, as well as legislation against discrimination, extend legal protection to other components of freedom identified by Freedom House, such as:
* Free businesses.
* Free professional and private organizations.
Of course, other criteria are possible. And we could choose many other ways of defining America's freedoms. But under any definition, the role of our Constitution and system of law and independent courts would be paramount. That's because freedom does not exist in a vacuum. It does not exist in the absence of laws–that would be chaos, in which the most aggressive, the most ruthless, and the strongest would flourish at the expense of the others. It exists under the nurture and protection of an orderly society, governed by laws, in which rights are respected.
The writer Hannah Arendt expressed this point in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She wrote that "to abolish the fences of laws" between people, as tyranny does, is to take away our liberties and destroy freedom, for the place between people, as it is hedged in by laws, "is the living space of freedom."
The great Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., expressed the same point more pointedly. "The right to swing your fist," he wrote, "ends at the point of another person's nose".
So "celebrating freedom" is more than Fourth of July speeches and fireworks. It's a recognition by us all that freedom does not simply happen by itself. For men and women to be free, they need protections from tyrants, and bullies — and sometimes from each other. That protection, that structure, is provided by law and independent courts. And it's that structure we celebrate this week on Law Day, as we celebrate our freedom. And so today, may we all take time to celebrate Law Day in a nation and a territory built upon the rule of law and renew once again our effort to form a more perfect union.
Editor's note: Tom Bolt is a local attorney practicing in St. Thomas and serves as ABA Delegate for the Virgin Islands.
