"Rights are the fruits of the law and the law alone . . . ." The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, Vol. III, p. 221 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843). Under the Constitution, the law is not "created" by individuals, but by elected representatives to Congress and to state and municipal legislative bodies pursuant to the constitutional guarantee of a Republican form of government. U.S. Const., Art. IV, sec. 4. It is the law that defines our rights; and it is the law that protects and preserves them.
All rights exist only by law, for without the law we have no rights. Without law, there is anarchy, which is antithetical to the very existence of rights. Rights can only exist within the structure of organized society subject to the rule of law. In this, it must be admitted that there can be no society without the law; it is the very fabric of social structure. It is, like the air we breathe, pervasive and essential, affecting every aspect of human relationships and endeavors. Beyond this lies only the uncertainty of uncivilized life where there is no society, where every man is a law unto himself and "kraft macht recht" (might makes right); and life, as Hobbes put it, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Such rights are nothing more than a scrambling possession that would be unlikely to last beyond the first to challenge the claim by force. The law is the only means by which real rights may be secured.