THE FIRST DUTY OF GOVERNMENT:
PROTECTION, LIBERTY AND THE
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT
STEVEN J. HEYMAN*
Extract;
As I show in Part II, the right to protection was not merely a matter
of constitutional theory, but a doctrine with concrete legal meaning. In
the common law tradition, the protection of the law implied both the
recognition offundamental rights by law, and the enforcement of such
rights by government. The paradigmatic instance was the government's
duty to protect individuals against violence. By the middle ofthe nineteenth century, this duty was understood to include not only the enforcement of civil and criminal law with respect to injuries already committed,
but also the responsibility to prevent violence before it occurred
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