It is still worse to worry about the one-sentence declarations of judicial philosophy that come forth with great assurance and little content from both sides of the aisle.
One hundred Christian ethicists signed a one-sentence declaration last month that opposed a pre-emptive war on Iraq.
The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence states: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor".
But it is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: "And for the support of this Declaration... we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor".
It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
This is the understanding of happiness with which the modern world begins; it is vividly captured in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which asserts as self-evident a right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
The final sentence of the declaration of that forum stated: "Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for moral understanding and justice".
The word "entitle" appears in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence (just as another dread word, "welfare," appears in the first sentence of the Constitution), but the present-day uses of its derivatives are, to put it mildly, problematic.
But the country's makeshift quality has always been apparent; it was revealed by the alarmingly vague second sentence in the declaration of independence from the Netherlands, which reads, "Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon as possible".
Instead of explicitly calling on both Turkey and Syria to exercise restraint, the final sentence of the declaration read: "The members of the Security Council called for restraint".
The very next sentence in the Declaration of Independence proclaims that "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed".
