Right To Jets Beating The Pats?

Alex Kozinski red flags some concerns about "natural law" here, but as I note in comments, things like saying a right to choose an abortion is one isn't necessarily a problem for me.  Natural rights to me are those society determines are basic to justice arising from our needs and experiences.  It provides at least some background context to right determination.  Something Benjamin Cardozo once said seems appropriate:

If, however, we can attribute to law the epithet 'natural,' it is, as we have said, in a different sense from that which formerly attached to the expression 'natural law.' That expression then meant that nature had imprinted in us, as one of the very elements of reason, certain principles of which all the articles of the code were only the application. The same expression ought to mean today that law springs from the relations of fact which exist between things. Like those relations themselves, natural law is in perpetual travail. It is no longer in texts or in systems derived from reason that we must look for the source of law; it is in social utility, in the necessity that certain consequences shall be attached to given hypotheses. The legislator has only a fragmentary consciousness of this law; he translates it by the rules which he prescribes. When the question is one of fixing the meaning of those rules, where ought we to search? Manifestly at their source; that is to say, in the exigencies of social life. There resides the strongest probability of discovering the sense of the law. In the same way when the question is one of supplying the gaps in the law, it is not of logical deductions, it is rather of social needs, that we are to ask the solution.

Don't expect me to be familiar with the whole text.  What I get out of this, however, is that there is an underlining "consciousness" that guides legislators and judges for that matter, and helps determine the nature of rights. This consciousness is a result of "social life," more broadly, our experiences as a society.  It helps to fill in the gaps, the text only going so far though it clearly helps and restrains some, including when determining what "due process" or the Ninth Amendment means. 

Alan D. wrote Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights in which he rejects natural rights. The book, however, to me doesn't quite do that.  "Natural rights" -- this is the charm as well as the burden -- has always had a broad meaning and rights that society (not God necessarily) determines are necessary by the "nature" of things can fit the bill.  These are fundamental rights (e.g., the grand jury is not "natural" while freedom of speech is) necessary to true happiness given our natural needs and make-up.  There is a "natural" connection there.

Anyway, a happy thanksgiving, and a big thank you to everyone who makes life that much more worth living.  And, go Jets.