Declaring Again for the Rule of Law on July 4, 2026

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th asks more of us than celebration. It asks for both remembrance and courage.

The Declaration’s most famous words remain foundational because they are not partisan: “all men are created equal,” endowed with rights no government may lawfully erase. The Founders called that truth “self-evident.” But the Declaration did not stop with lofty ideals. It made a relentless, detailed case, a lawyer’s case against tyranny: power exercised without consent, punishment without due process, trade strangled to compel obedience, troops imposed upon homes, courts manipulated, taxes levied to fund policies the people had no voice in shaping.

Those grievances were not abstractions. They were the lived experience of colonists, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, who believed government becomes illegitimate when it places itself above law.

As David McCullough recounts in John Adams, independence did not arrive in a burst of certainty. Adams and Jefferson, different in temperament but united in purpose, labored through the Second Continental Congress to persuade cautious colonies that the time had come to stand together. Adams understood the danger of the word “tyranny.” It was grave, inflammatory, and irreversible. Yet the facts demanded moral clarity.

To sign the Declaration was to risk being branded traitors. Benjamin Franklin’s warning still echoes: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

That is the inheritance of lawyers, from Jefferson and Adams on, in a constitutional republic. We are not called merely to admire the rule of law when it is safe. We are called to defend it when power becomes impatient with limits.

Today, whenever any administration claims immunity from accountability, treats public funds as political spoils, defies courts, threatens state control of elections, sweeps people from homes without meaningful process, separates families, imposes indiscriminate economic punishments, or uses blockades and coercive force absent necessity, lawyers must ask the Founders’ question: Has power submitted to law, or has it demanded that law submit to power?

Georgia Lawyers for the Rule of Law can answer in the spirit of 1776: nonpartisan, constitutional, and firm. No person is above the law. No executive is a king. No fear, faction, or claimed emergency can erase due process, equal justice, or democratic consent.

On this anniversary, let us not merely celebrate independence. Let us declare again, with unity and courage, that we stand for democracy and against authoritarianism, for the self-evident truth and against tyranny, that we stand for the rule of law.