Texas Bar Journal • July/August 2026

What the Declaration of Independence Asks of Us at 250

A look at a country built on shared principles.

Written by A. Regenold Bright

“We … solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right
ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all
Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and
the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”

The Declaration of Independence committed the new nation to a project its founders had not yet achieved and knew might never fully be achieved. Rather than hand down a political identity future Americans could passively embody, the declaration transferred something more valuable and more demanding—a continuous and collective effort to bring its defining principles into reality. Two hundred and fifty years later, that incompleteness is an opportunity for reflection.

In drafting the declaration, Thomas Jefferson recorded observations made by political philosophers for centuries before him about the truths of human dignity and freedom that exist in nature. Jefferson described those principles as “an expression of the American mind,”1 encompassing self-evident rights and consent-based governance. It is the government’s mandate, the declaration posits, to recognize and protect those truths, or lose its legitimacy. Benjamin Franklin, an editor of the declaration and signatory of the Constitution, doubted whether the new nation could endure. His doubt, however, rested not in the principles themselves, but in the people’s ability to administer them and resist despotic government in the long-term.2

Whether too lofty in its ambitions or self-aggrandizing in its denunciation of the British crown, the declaration gave a critical statement of purpose and identity to the political polity it was forming. On its 250th anniversary, the Declaration of Independence can be recognized not as a finished statement of American identity but as an ongoing invitation to participate in the pursuit of the aspirations it recorded.

“… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The “self-evident” truths presented in the declaration have never been easily accepted as such. The principle-based national identity coexisted with exclusion, control, and violence from the start of the country, and those tensions persist. However, a system grounded in principle contains within itself the standard against which its failures are measured over time. The 14th Amendment marked one such constitutional reckoning with that standard. Subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the amendment’s universal language extended application of these principles, dismantling the legal architecture of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education3 and recognizing the right of birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the U.S. in Wong Kim Ark.4

Grievance 7 Against the King: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

While the principles justifying independence were borrowed from centuries of philosophers and theologians, they were not well-defined standards, nor broadly held by a settled polity. They were staking principles that would bind a still-developing membership. Anticipation of newcomers was the foundation for Grievance 7 in the declaration. In justifying the colonies’ political separation from their kin in Britain, the founders accused the king of obstructing population growth in the colonies. What endures from that time is the recognition that the title of “American” is not fixed. As our polity continues to unfold, it is the principles laid out in the declaration that we rely on to tie our political community together. In the past decade alone, the U.S. has welcomed nearly 8 million new citizens who have sworn to uphold the shared commitments to principle that define membership.5 Yet, defining and realizing the substance of those principles are not questions that only the newcomer must reckon with. They are principles of action the country as a whole must test ourselves against over and over again. The choice to pursue our shared underlying ideals, whether as a member of the political polity by choice or a member by birth, contributes to the resilient fabric the Declaration of Independence began to weave.

“We hold these truths …”

In a nation where “the law is king,” legal professionals have a particular obligation to reflect on the principles underlying the systems they operate.6 While the Constitution can provide guidance on what the law allows, the Declaration of Independence speaks to the question of what the law is for. Every client who walks into an office presents an issue that the attorney is asked to build a strategy around. The work of an attorney is not mere legal compliance. It is, more fundamentally, identifying and achieving the client’s purpose. The same is true of the profession itself. At its best, the practice of law is the ongoing effort to close the distance between where we are and what we promise to be.

The continuous effort this pursuit requires can be frustratingly arduous and iterative. This is the responsibility of active participation the Founding Fathers accepted on our behalf when they wrote, “We hold these truths.” The declaration’s foundational claim is not that the truths will self-sustain. It is that this political community choses to hold them—to build a country based on shared underlying values and to act accordingly. The preservation of our shared principles and the strength with which they bind us inherently require reflection and effort.

The day-to-day work of a legal professional cannot be sustained in a constant exercise of existential reflection on purpose and identity. Because these are not questions of everyday attention but nonetheless of defining import, the occasion to reflect should not be overlooked. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is such an opportunity, to reaffirm the truths we continue to hold and commit to the work that holding them requires. In this reflection, the declaration serves to connect us to the principles that gave us a shared identity to build on, or to otherwise make our departure visible.

A. REGENOLD BRIGHT is the Moody Foundation Visiting Professor of Law and a Englehardt Research Fellow at St. Mary’s University School of Law.