It was Voltaire, father of the French Enlightenment, who said, “Rights Lost are Rarely Restored.” His admonition was intended to stir people to protect their political rights because once they are taken it is difficult to reclaim them. Though true generally, there have been many exceptions to this maxim in the United States.

The biggest historical exception was the Twenty-First Amendment that repealed Prohibition. Americans lost the legal right to drink when the Eighteenth Amendment was passed; it prohibited the consumption of alcohol. Rights were lost. They were restored in the 1930’s when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed prohibition.

Second Amendment proponents considered the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 a terrible encroachment on their gun rights. The right to own those weapons was lost for a period, but the statute expired in 2004. Rights that had been lost were restored. Gun owners could again own weapons that had previously been banned.

In the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to strike down an archaic statute that criminalized sodomy. A police officer entered Hardwick’s home, observed him engaged in homosexual sodomy, and arrested him. Hardwick’s privacy rights were lost when the Supreme Court allowed the Georgia statute to stand. In 2003, the Court explicitly overruled the Bowers case in a similar case from Texas, thereby restoring what people had presumed to be a right to engage in private consensual relations in the intimacy of one’s home. The Court found that the Texas statute violated Due Process under the Fourteenth Amendment. People like Hardwick had their rights restored.

The fingerprint mess in Georgia is another case where rights were lost and then restored. In 1996, the Georgia government enacted into law a statute that required fingerprints from drivers. People fought for years in the General Assembly, the courts, in the Governor’s races, and in the forum of public opinion to change the statute. Finally in 2005 the new Governor helped repeal the statute. It is no longer the practice of the Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles to collect fingerprints from applicants for the driver’s license. Rights that had been lost were restored.