Law and Legal Issues

The business of life depends on a healthy life of business. A healthy life of business requires an environment conducive to its establishment, smooth running and flourishing, and protection of its income and property. It is because of this that many indices that measure in fact various business factors place rule of law at the top.

The greatest affliction that can happen to a nation is that its institutions brazenly indulge in activities other than what they are supposed to be involved in by general consensus or assigned to them by law or constitution. Thus, they defy their own raison detre. One such institution is government.

A new international index reveals how laws on physical and intellectual property stimulate growth while the weakest economies have the weakest laws. Today’s first annual International Property Rights Index (IPRI) measures seventy countries’ performance in the protection of land titles and copyrights, assets and patents showing the direct effect on economic well-being.

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, is one of the greatest documents human history has produced. The more one reads it, the more meaningful, more insightful it becomes. Another aspect is its way of asserting certain things negatively. That is what I am interested in presenting here. Let us see whether the Declaration substantiates this sort of reading between the lines.