RIGHTS

Individuals enjoy unlimited set of the rights. The right is a faculty of doing something, of omitting or refusing to do something or of claiming something. Rights are moral principles sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. Every right we have emanates from our right to private property. In this sense, "private property" means not only the right to one's home and land, but also the right to own the product of one's labor. James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote in 1789, "A man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions."
In jurisprudence and law, a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. Compare with privilege, or a thing to which one has a just claim. Rights serve as rules of interaction between people, and, as such, they place constraints and obligations upon the actions of individuals or groups (for example, if one has a right to life, this means that others do not have the liberty to kill him).

Most modern conceptions of rights are Universalist and egalitarian — in other words, equal rights are granted to all people. There are two main modern conceptions of rights: on the one hand, the idea of natural rights holds that there is a certain list of rights enshrined in nature that cannot be legitimately modified by any human power. On the other hand, the idea of legal rights holds that rights are human constructs, created by society, enforced by governments and subject to change.

Rights can be divided into individual rights that are held by citizens as individuals (or corporations) recognised by the legal system and collective rights, held by an ensemble of citizens or a subgroup of citizens who have a certain characteristic in common. In some cases there can be an amount of tension between individual and collective rights.

In other cases, the view of collective and individual rights held by one group can come into sharp and bitter conflict with the view of rights held by another group. For instance compare Manifest destiny with Trail of Tears. Rights have the economic purpose of enabling each individual to optimize his or her capacity to make a unique contribution others cannot make.