Senator Joseph Biden at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, quoted verbatim by the Wall Street Journal, September 12, 1991:

Okay, I'm beginning to understand. So, natural law informed the notion of liberty. You and I have both read—because of our backgrounds, I suspect—we've both read—I won't get into Aquinas and Augustine and all that, but Locke looked back to the concept of natural law as an evolving notion. Montesquieu talked about it. Jefferson understood it. He was in Paris. He was probably the only one that fully understood it. But others who were there writing the Constitution, they talked about it, they had what they wrote—both the Declaration, as you say, in other places and in the Constitution—they reduced these broad notions of natural law—the natural rights of man to this document.

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