A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to
make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the
motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system
that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.
The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And
although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for
the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a
constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the
government.