4 Thomas Jefferson — "The Declaration of Independence" (1776)

Structure (three moves): (1) the preamble — the natural-law premises: self-evident truths; unalienable rights (life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness); governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" the right of the people to alter or abolish; (2) the grievances against George III (a litany of charges — a bill of particulars, drafted like a legal pleading: "He has…"); (3) the declaration — independence itself, with the appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and a final reliance on "divine Providence." Legal significance: the founding document of natural rights as constitutional politics (Jurisprudence Unit 3.1's modern phase enacted); the ancestry of every bill of rights since — including Nepal's fundamental-rights chapter's premise that rights precede the state; and a standing lesson in declaratory drafting (the three-part architecture: principle → justification → act). Rhetoric to study: parallelism, anaphora ("He has…"), the gravity of abstraction ("self-evident") — and the historical irony (slavery unmentioned) that launches every serious discussion of aspirational texts and their gaps.