   #copyright

Civil rights

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Animal & Human Rights

                                                       Theories of rights
                                                          Animal rights
                                                        Children's rights
                                                          Civil rights
                                                        Collective rights
                                                          Group rights
                                                          Human rights
                                                       Inalienable rights
                                                        Individual rights
                                                          Legal rights
                                                          Men's rights
                                                         Natural rights
                                                       Negative & positive
                                                          Social rights
                                                       "Three generations"
                                                         Women's rights
                                                         Workers' rights
                                                          Youth rights

   Lyndon B. Johnson signs the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.
   Lyndon B. Johnson signs the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.
   Lyndon B. Johnson meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King,
   Jr., Whitney Young, James Farmer
   Lyndon B. Johnson meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King,
   Jr., Whitney Young, James Farmer

   Civil rights are the protections and privileges of personal power given
   to all citizens by law. Civil rights are distinguished from "human
   rights" or " natural rights", also called "our God-given rights". They
   are rights that are bestowed by nations on those within their
   territorial boundaries, while natural or human rights are rights that
   many scholars claim should belong to all people. For example, the
   philosopher John Locke ( 1632– 1704) argued that the natural rights of
   life, liberty and property should be converted into civil rights and
   protected by the sovereign state as an aspect of the social contract.
   Others have argued that people acquire rights as an inalienable gift
   from the deity or at a time of nature before governments were formed.

   Laws guaranteeing civil rights may be written down, derived from custom
   or implied. In the United States and most continental European
   countries, civil rights laws are most often written. Examples of civil
   rights and liberties include the right to get redress if injured by
   another, the right to privacy, the right of peaceful protest, the right
   to a fair investigation and trial if suspected of a crime, and more
   generally-based constitutional rights such as the right to vote, the
   right to personal freedom, the right to freedom of movement and the
   right of equal protection. As civilisations emerged and formalised
   through written constitutions, some of the more important civil rights
   were granted to citizens. When those grants were later found
   inadequate, civil rights movements emerged as the vehicle for claiming
   more equal protection for all citizens and advocating new laws to
   restrict the effect of current discriminations.

Related terminology

   The term 'negro rights' is often used synonymously with civil
   liberties, even though theoretical jurisprudence distinguishes between
   right and liberty. The root of the word 'civil' reflects the
   association between a bundle of rights and 'citizenship'. The term
   Human rights refers to a broader concept.

   In the early legal systems of Ancient Rome, women and slaves had no
   right to vote whether as a juror or for political purposes, and
   ownership of property was an aspect of patria potestas, i.e. only the
   father of the family could own property, his wife, relatives and
   children having no right of ownership. Similarly, the [medieval]
   European city-states limited access to the status of citizenship and
   the civil rights associated with it. This practice of dividing
   societies by reference to class or caste associates privilege with the
   upper layers of society and means that civil rights attach to people by
   virute of their citizenship of a state.

   Today, in most western societies, it is taken for granted that every
   person has a number of rights and freedoms, which are valued deeply,
   closely associated to the modern concept of democracy and supported by
   public policy. Civil rights are claimed to be the pillars of modern
   societies. Nevertheless, it is domicile that attaches to an individual
   at birth, regardless of such factors as race, gender or class, and
   determines status and capacity. As each individual moves from state to
   state, the extent of the civil rights to be enjoyed will be determined
   by the interaction between the domicile of origin, and the cultures and
   laws of those states in which that person resides as a citizen..

   The term human rights is not limited to citizenship of one state and
   reflects the concept of fundamental rights that all human beings can
   claim. Whereas 'civil rights', 'civil liberties' and 'constitutional
   rights' are used to denote expectations as to [behaviour] and treatment
   by fellow citizens in any one sovereign state, 'human rights' is more
   often used in the context of international law, the supranational
   systems of law that may or may not have direct effect in sovereign
   states depending on the treaties signed by each state and the nature of
   their legal systems. Human rights include civil rights. The term may
   also refer to the rights of refugees and the problems of statelessness;
   however, the debate on the extent of fundamental human rights is much
   broader subject. Jurist Karel Vasak, for example, discusses a right to
   peace and the right to a clean environment as fundamental human rights.

Theoretical background: The concept of right

   Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld ( 1879– 1918) maintained that analysis of legal
   issues is frequently muddled and inconsistent because the legal
   concepts are improperly understood. The first question, therefore, is
   to understand what the rights are in "civil rights". There are two
   major schools of thought:
     * Hohfeld proposed a structured system of interrelated concepts
     * Nozick and Rawls approached the concept of rights from the
       perspectives of libertarian and political belief.

Hohfeld's concept of right

   Hohfeld distinguished right from liberty, and power from
   immunity—concepts that are often used interchangeably in non-technical
   discourse, but are philosophically different. By examining the
   relationships between these concepts, he hoped to explain the legal
   interests that have evolved in the real world of civil society and to
   answer the question whether citizens of a state have any right to
   access any of the possible forms of social security. ~ Right and duty
   are corelative concepts, i.e. one must always be matched by the other.
   If A claims a right against B, this is meaningless unless B has a duty
   to honour A's right. If B has no duty, that means that B has liberty,
   i.e. B can do whatever he or she pleases because B has no duty to
   refrain from doing it, and A has no right to prohibit B from doing so.
   An individual would be considered to have perfect liberty if no one has
   a right to prevent the given act. ~ Power means the capacity to create
   legal relationships and to create rights and liabilities. The
   correlative of power is liability. If A has power over B, B must have
   liability towards A. For example, properly constituted courts have the
   power to pass judgements that impose liabilities but, if the defendants
   are outside the courts' jurisdiction, the judgements are unenforceable.
   Similarly, a legislature has power to make laws, but those laws that
   attempt to restrict a fundamental right may be unconstitutional. If the
   laws are valid, they create a disability; the legal opposite of
   disability is power. So, children or people suffering from a mental
   disability should be protected from liability and their power to make a
   binding contract is removed. A person loses the right to sue another to
   recover a debt if the period of limitation has expired. ~ The legal
   opposite of liability is immunity. In some countries, government
   departments exercising sovereign powers cannot be sued in tort and the
   President or the Prime Minister cannot be personally liable in respect
   of any contract made or assurance given for the purposes of the state.
   These are examples of immunities.

   Although the word right is often used to describe liberty, power, or
   immunity, Hohfeld clearly distinguished them. Indeed, Hohfeld described
   liberty as an a priori condition of the rule of law, coming into
   existence long before any Bill of Rights and offering an individual
   power to the extent that it is not restricted by any law. Essentially,
   Hohfeld believed that anyone who tries to encroach on the liberty of a
   citizen must be required to demonstrate their clear right to do so.
   After more than eighty years of consideration, some doubt whether this
   set of conceptual relationships is philosophically sustainable. But,
   the core juxtaposition of right, duty and liberty remains a seductive
   argument.

Libertarian and political theory: Nozick and Rawls

Minimal state

   Robert Nozick (1938–2002) offered a model of a minimal state, described
   as libertarianism. Nozick argued that no state is ever justified in
   offering anything more than the most minimal of state functions, and
   further, that whatever might exist by way of rights exists only in the
   negative sense of those actions not yet prohibited. He denied the
   possibility that any citizen can have rights that require others to
   offer him or her services at the state's expense, and tested whether
   exchanges between individuals were legitimate by an entitlement theory:
     * The "transfer principle" holds that goods or services "freely
       acquired from others who acquired them in a just way are justly
       acquired"
     * The "acquisition principle" states that people are entitled to
       retain all holdings acquired in a just way
     * The "rectification principle" requires that any violation of the
       first two principles be repaired by returning holdings to their
       rightful owners as a "one time" redistribution (a reference to the
       Rawlsian Difference Principle).

   Nozick, therefore, believed that there are no positive civil rights,
   only rights to property and the right of autonomy. For him, a just
   society does as much as possible to protect everyone's independence and
   freedom to take any action for the benefit of one's self. This is an
   important teleological protection: the Jeffersonian political
   philosophy right to the pursuit of happiness is the freedom to engage
   in any actions so long as they do not infringe upon that same right
   exercised by others.

   Critics of the minimal state-model argue that a state which provides no
   services to citizens is inadequate.

Just society

   John Rawls (1921–2002) developed a model of a different form of just
   society which relied on:
     * The "liberty principle" which holds that citizens require minimal
       civil and legal rights to protect themselves
     * The "difference principle" which states that every citizen would
       want to live in a society where improving the condition of the
       poorest becomes the first priority.

   For Rawls, a right is an "entitlement or justified claim on others"
   which comprises both negative and positive obligations, i.e. both that
   others must not harm anyone (negative obligation), and surrender a
   proportion of their earnings through taxation for the benefit of
   low-income earners (positive). This blurs the relationship between
   rights and duties as proposed by Hohfeld. For example if a citizen had
   the right to free medical care, then others (through the agency of the
   government) would be obligated to provide that service.

   Critics of Rawls' approach doubt whether the difference principle is
   congruous with a state consistently applying the capitalist model.
   Rawls' ideas however have influenced the implementation of social
   market economies within a capitalist system in European countries like
   Germany.

   The difference between Rawls and Nozick is that Rawls thought that a
   state should always provide the basic fundamentals of physical
   existence, whereas Nozick gave no guarantee save that an individual
   always had the freedom to pursue happiness.

Implied rights

   "Implied" rights are rights that a court may find to exist even though
   not expressly guaranteed by written law or custom, on the theory that a
   written or customary right must necessarily include the implied right.
   One famous (and controversial) example of a right implied from the U.S.
   Constitution is the "right to privacy", which the U.S. Supreme Court
   found to exist in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut. In the 1973
   case of Roe v. Wade, the court found that state legislation prohibiting
   or limiting abortion violated this right to privacy. As a rule, state
   governments can expand civil rights beyond the U.S. Constitution, but
   they cannot diminish Constitutional rights.

By region

United States

   Civil rights can in one sense refer to the equal treatment of all
   citizens irrespective of race, sex, or other class, or it can refer to
   laws which invoke claims of positive liberty. An example of the former
   would be the decision in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483
   (1954) that was concerned with the constitutionality of laws which
   imposed segregation in the education systems of some U.S states. The
   U.S. legislature subsequently addressed the issue through the Civil
   Rights Act of 1964 Sec. 201. which states: (a) All persons shall be
   entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services,
   facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of
   public accommodation, as defined in this section, without
   discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, colour, religion,
   or national origin.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights"
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