Let me rephrase: how can you have <i>legal</i> power without <i>legal</i> rights. (Answer: you can&#x27;t.)<p>Sure, a slave can physically harm his master even though the slave has no legal rights. But the legal authority of his society will then fall upon him, and he will have no redress to process--like a presumption of innocence or evidentiary rules. He is property, and property can be destroyed by its owner.<p>Likewise, in a society in which the right to rule is conferred divinely, a king&#x27;s subjects do not have the legal right to challenge the king&#x27;s rulings. From a practical perspective, a populace can depose a king, but then what? If they install a new king, then that king assumes the same right to rule. If they choose to set up a republic, then they need a new basis for right to rule.<p>Natural rights are like the legal equivalent of a logical axiom. Legal reasoning must have a place from which to start; by asserting a small set of permanent, self-evident rights, the law has a foundation upon which to build a government of equals. Then the conversation can shift from &quot;how does a government of equals grant the right to live&quot; to &quot;what are the few circumstances in which the law can impinge the right to live?&quot;<p>The handy thing about the latter architecture is that the law becomes self-referential--the Constitution describes the powers and limits of the <i>government</i> rather than trying to comprehensively list all powers and rights of the <i>people</i> in all situations--which would be a much longer and more complicated list.