>>>>Our political lexicon, that is, the language that we use to talk about law and justice
is suffused, it's filled throughout with the language of rights. We use rights, we use
this language without even thinking about it. And so it's especially important to step
back and try and define what we mean when we invoke the language of rights. What are
rights? We've defined property, and property is a bundle of rights. So it's important that
we in turn define rights, and then try to ask what justifies certain kinds of rights
and then, in the broadest sense, throughout the rest of this course ask what is the moral
weight of rights? What kind of justice claim can be founded on rights? And so we can begin
simply by saying, what is a right? Well in English it's important to distinguish between
the word right and a right. Right is an adjective, means, "an order in which things are in some
sense correct, normative, or morally appropriate." It's right that someone does something. That's
slightly different, although there's obviously a connection between the meanings. Here we're
talking about the use of right as a noun. "It's my right to do x." You have a right
to this or that. And so here we're talking about right as a noun and in particular, belonging
to an individual subject who has this right. And one of the great legal analysts of the
earliest 20th century named Hohfeld, who is a professor of law, finished his career at
Yale gave a, a vastly influential exploration of what we mean when we use the language of
rights. And he says in fact, that we use right to mean four different kinds of things. We
use it to mean privilege, we use it to mean a claim, we use it to mean a power, and we
use it to mean an immunity. And it's been a very powerful exploration of what rights
are. So let's explore what these four things that rights can be mean in this system of
analysis. A right can be a privilege, and it's very similar to the right to use something.
I have a right to type on my computer. I have a right to drive my car. In essence that's
my privilege, and a property right is deeply connected to this kind of privilege of ownership.
I can also say that I have a right in the sense that I have a claim. And so I have a
right to receive medical practice, to receive medical attention when I pay for it. You have
a right as a student for me to teach you and to be here and teaching this class. In fact
it's that's quite complicated because there's a third party. You actually pay the university
and the university pays me and so there's a series of transactions involved, but its
nevertheless a claim. It's a claim, in fact, that's created by a contract and in this sense
it's actually somewhat easy to explain where this kind of right comes from. Now those are
in a sense first order rights. They're a higher order of rights that are considered powers
and immunities. And so a power is a right that means I have the ability to command.
I have the ability to change a situation. And so a mother has the right to order her
child to eat broccoli. She has that power and that can come from different places. In
our society that's a parent-child relationship. There can be other kinds of relationship.
A military commander has the right to command a soldier to march into battle. And so these
kinds of rights can have complex origins. They can even be constitutional powers. So
a president has the right to command the army in times of war because he's the executive
in chief. The fourth kind of way that we use the language of rights is as an immunity,
and think of this like the rights that are protected. "No matter what, I have the right
to free speech", an American might say. That means that I have an immunity. I have some
claim, some protection on my ability to do something that you cannot infringe even if
you have powers. And so these too, a second order kinds of rights can be considered constitutional
in a sense. The right the right to religious expression, the right to to freedom of speech,
the rights of the press, the right to bear arms, those are immunities that are protected
by the Bill of Rights. That is that there are limits on state power. So these are the
ways in which we use the language of rights, but as we move throughout the rest of this
class we want to ask what justifies certain kinds of rights? And what is the limit of
rights? How much moral weight do they carry? As we'll see, the language of rights, the
concept of rights, tends to carry tremendous weight in our way of thinking about justice.