Significantly, the fundamental principles of governments upholding individual freedoms and ensuring national security do not have to be mutually exclusive.
True modernity, Mr Gupta writes, entails adhering to universal norms, upholding individual rights, making the state accountable.
"I think that the Eighth Circuit is going to look hypocritical if they do not uphold individual players' property rights in their own bodes," he said.
Both the market-states and the nation-states of the West are democratic; they are "states of consent," in which the rule of law exists to uphold individual liberty and rights.
Mr. Liu, 53, was seized by security officials in December 2008 as he and other intellectuals prepared to issue Charter 08, a lengthy manifesto that called on China's Communist Party to uphold individual rights and relinquish its monopoly on power.
A look back at the last decade is not encouraging to those who believe as I do that our courts should dispense justice in keeping with the progress we have made in upholding individual rights, ending discrimination, and adhering to our founding principles of liberty and justice for all.
It is easy to see the contradiction--some say hypocrisy--in the author of the Declaration of Independence and the father of the Constitution lording over plantations of more than one hundred slaves and presiding over a government devoted to upholding individual rights while being served by enslaved footmen in livery.
Questioned by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on guns, Kagan said she accepts a recent ruling upholding individuals' rights to possess firearms, but she would not say whether she believed there was a "fundamental right" – meaning one that applies to states as well as the federal government – to bear arms.
(The court nevertheless upheld the individual mandate as a legitimate exercise of Congress's taxing power).
Two federal judges upheld the individual mandate this year, saying that it fell under Congress's power to regulate commerce.
