indispensable right

Mr. de Dios was shot execution style in a Queens restaurant two years ago "because he was exercising his constitutional rights" of freedom of the press, "indispensable rights that make us a free society and that many, many people have died for," the judge said.

When we compare the strange respect of mankind for liberty, with their strange want of respect for it, we might imagine that a man had an indispensable right to do harm to others, and no right at all to please himself without giving pain to any one.

This revolt - symbolized by the first Earth Day in 1970, and defined by the creation of an astonishing body of environmental laws - not only gave the nation the tools with which to heal itself but conferred upon ordinary citizens the indispensable right to take even the government to court if it failed to carry out these laws.