By : I love the United States of America fervently. I love Western Values – or, as Daniel Hannan (a British Conservative MEP) put it, less politely, in his book How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters, “the characteristic features of the Anglo-American political system” (which, of course have been adopted more widely, especially after 1945 and again after 1989). With Western – or Anglo-American – values, I include such features as: habeas corpus, equality before the law and jury trials, which will be particularly pertinent to what I want to talk about today. These are features that found their purest and most beautiful literary and legal expression in the U.S. Constitution.Please excuse my Britsplaining but – the Constitution is not a document that resulted from abstract, theoretical ruminations on what a good society would look like – The Constitution was the heroic response of the founders of this nation to escaping from a tyrannical state. They enshrined due process and fair treatment under the law (in Amendments V-VIII and XIV of The Bill of Rights) because they knew what life was like without those things, both from their collective memory of capricious governance in Britain and as British subjects in America. Their rejection of arbitrary detention and cruel and unusual punishments and their insistence on due process were truly progressive.