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signs the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964.
meets with civil rights leaders
Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young,
James FarmerCivil 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". Civil rights are rights that are bestowed by
nations on those within their territorial boundaries, while natural or human rights are rights that many scholars claim that individuals have by nature of being born. 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
sovereignty state as an aspect of the
social contract. Others have argued that people acquire rights as an
inalienable rights gift from a deity (such as God) or at a time of
State of nature before governments were formed.
Laws guaranteeing civil rights may be written down, derived from custom (law) 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 suffrage, the right to personal freedom, the right to freedom of movement and the right of equal protection. As civilizations emerged and formalized 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.
Theoretical background: The concept of rights
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879–1918) maintained that
wiktionary: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 (sociology) from
immunity (legal)—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 correlative 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 honor 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 judgments that impose liabilities but, if the defendants are outside the courts' jurisdiction, the judgments 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 (law); 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 sovereignty 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
philosophy sustainable. But, the core
juxtaposition of
right,
duty and
liberty remains a seductive argument.
Political theories of a just state: Rawls and Nozick
Just society
John Rawls (1921–2002) developed a
model (abstract) 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 congruence with a state consistently applying the capitalism model. Rawls' ideas however have influenced the implementation of social market economy within a capitalist system in European countries like Germany.
Minimal state
Robert Nozick (1938–2002) offered a model of a
Minarchism, 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 "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 liberty civil rights, only rights to property and the right of Wiktionary: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
teleology 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.
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 United States 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 (social), 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. Congress 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, color, religion, or national origin. This legislation and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 have constitutional stature as enumerations of civil rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although the
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is often thought of as the civil rights amendment, all constitutional protections are considered within the US as civil rights. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "a free people their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774. ME 1:209, Papers 1:134 http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0100.htmlawsThe
United States Constitution recognizes different civil rights than do most other national constitutions. Two examples of civil rights found in the US but rarely (if ever) elsewhere are the right to bear arms (
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution) and the right to a jury trial (Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution). Few nations, not even including the
United Nations, have recognized either of these civil rights. Many nations recognize an individual's civil right to not be executed for crimes, a civil right not recognized within the US.
See also
Agencies
People
Politics
Related topics
Notes
References
- Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
- Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, ed. by W.W. Cook (1919); reprint, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books. 1974.
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Revised edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), ISBN 0-674-00077-3.
- Jean Edward Smith & Herbert M. Levine, Civil Liberties & Civil Rights Debated, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988.
External links
- Civil Rights Resource Guide, from the Library of Congress
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
- The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
- Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
- Civil Rights Theory Blog
- Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Florida
- Civil Rights Movement Veterans
- Susan Klopfer's Mississippi Civil Rights Bookstore
- Guardians of Freedom - 50th Anniversary of Operation Arkansas, by ARMY.MIL
- Civil Rights.org
- St. Augustine Race Riots Brief video clip of demonstrations by blacks on Butler Beach in St. Augustine.
- Civil Rights Movement
- Freedom in the World -Political freedoms and civil rights ranking
- Religious Freedom with Raptors
- Study of the civil rights movement in America.
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Civil Rights Act of 1866
- Civil Rights Act of 1871
- Virginia Civil Rights Memorial information.
signs the U.S.
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Whitney Young,
James FarmerCivil 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". Civil rights are rights that are bestowed by nations on those within their territorial boundaries, while natural or human rights are rights that many scholars claim that individuals have by nature of being born. 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
sovereignty state as an aspect of the social contract. Others have argued that people acquire rights as an
inalienable rights gift from a deity (such as God) or at a time of State of nature before governments were formed.
Laws guaranteeing civil rights may be written down, derived from
custom (law) 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
suffrage, the right to personal freedom, the right to freedom of movement and the right of equal protection. As civilizations emerged and formalized 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.
Theoretical background: The concept of rights
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879–1918) maintained that
wiktionary: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 (sociology) from
immunity (legal)—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 correlative 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 honor 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 judgments that impose liabilities but, if the defendants are outside the courts' jurisdiction, the judgments 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 (law); 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 sovereignty 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
philosophy sustainable. But, the core juxtaposition of
right,
duty and
liberty remains a seductive argument.
Political theories of a just state: Rawls and Nozick
Just society
John Rawls (1921–2002) developed a
model (abstract) 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
congruence with a state consistently applying the
capitalism model. Rawls' ideas however have influenced the
implementation of social market economy within a capitalist system in European countries like Germany.
Minimal state
Robert Nozick (1938–2002) offered a model of a Minarchism, 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 "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 liberty civil rights, only rights to property and the right of
Wiktionary: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 teleology 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.
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 United States 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 (social), 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. Congress 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, color, religion, or national origin. This legislation and the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 have constitutional stature as enumerations of civil rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is often thought of as the civil rights amendment, all constitutional protections are considered within the US as civil rights. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "a free people their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate."Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774. ME 1:209, Papers 1:134 http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0100.htm
lawsThe
United States Constitution recognizes different civil rights than do most other national constitutions. Two examples of civil rights found in the US but rarely (if ever) elsewhere are the right to bear arms (Second Amendment to the United States Constitution) and the right to a jury trial (
Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution). Few nations, not even including the
United Nations, have recognized either of these civil rights. Many nations recognize an individual's civil right to not be executed for crimes, a civil right not recognized within the US.
See also
Agencies
People
Politics
Related topics
Notes
References
- Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
- Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, ed. by W.W. Cook (1919); reprint, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books. 1974.
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Revised edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), ISBN 0-674-00077-3.
- Jean Edward Smith & Herbert M. Levine, Civil Liberties & Civil Rights Debated, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988.
External links
- Civil Rights Resource Guide, from the Library of Congress
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
- The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
- Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
- Civil Rights Theory Blog
- Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Florida
- Civil Rights Movement Veterans
- Susan Klopfer's Mississippi Civil Rights Bookstore
- Guardians of Freedom - 50th Anniversary of Operation Arkansas, by ARMY.MIL
- Civil Rights.org
- St. Augustine Race Riots Brief video clip of demonstrations by blacks on Butler Beach in St. Augustine.
- Civil Rights Movement
- Freedom in the World -Political freedoms and civil rights ranking
- Religious Freedom with Raptors
- Study of the civil rights movement in America.
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Civil Rights Act of 1866
- Civil Rights Act of 1871
- Virginia Civil Rights Memorial information.
Civil rights
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Frequently asked questions about civil rights
Frequently asked questions about civil rights. ... The site was last updated on 29 July 2008. All links to other websites will open in a new window.
Civil Rights::
Civil Rights in America, civil rights issues in Twentieth Century America. This civil rights section includes Martin Luther King, the NAACP, civil rights acts, rosa parks and ...
Civil Rights Movement in the United States
USA History: Civil Rights 1860-1980
1964 Civil Rights Act
In the 1960 presidential election campaign John F. Kennedy argued for a new Civil Rights Act. After the election it was discovered that over 70 per cent of the African American ...
Civil Rights Today
Civil Rights Today from the most comprehensive global news network on the internet. International News, Investigative Journalism and analysis on current events, business ... ...
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CAIN: Events: Civil Rights - ... We Shall Overcome" .... The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968 - 1978 by NICRA (1978)
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CAIN: Events: Civil Rights Campaign - menu ... Text: Martin Melaugh ... Research: Fionnuala McKenna and Martin Melaugh Material is added to this site on a regular basis ...
LCCR - Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Resource for current news, events, reports and organizations. Also includes information on hate crimes and affirmative action.
BBC News | ARTS | Arthur Miller fears for civil rights
Covers Miller's fears about loss of freedoms following 9/11 attacks. From the BBC.