For Tiedeman, a natural right was what judges thought people believed to be a natural right, and such rights became the basis of law and part of the “unwritten” as well as the written Constitution. The actual Constitution, he argued, was just the skeleton; the flesh and blood was the “unwritten Constitution,” which was in practice largely the work of the Supreme Court. Tiedeman was no originalist; he admitted that the Constitution changed with the times. He argued that changes elucidated by judges reflected the evolving morality of the nation.
