Natural rights and legal rights

Natural rights are held by people independently of legal recognition, while legal rights are created, defined, or enforced by laws and institutions. A right can belong to both categories when law recognizes a claim also defended as inherent.

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Legal positivism: A theory that identifies law through social sources and institutions rather than its moral merits. It explains legal validity without requiring rights to exist independently of law.
Stoicism: An ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that emphasizes virtue, reason, and living according to nature. Its account of shared human reason helped shape later ideas of universal moral standing.
Hohfeldian analysis: A framework that distinguishes claim-rights, liberties, powers, and immunities by their legal relations. It shows that calling something a right can describe several different kinds of entitlement.
Human rights: Rights attributed to all people by virtue of being human, often expressed in international law. They combine claims of universal moral entitlement with formal legal instruments.
Rights inflation: The concern that expanding the language of rights makes claims less clear or harder to prioritize. It challenges whether every important moral or social interest should be framed as a right.
Natural law: A tradition holding that law is answerable to moral principles grounded in human nature or reason. It supplies a foundation for claims that some rights precede enacted law.
Roman law: The legal system developed in ancient Rome and its later interpretations. Roman legal categories influenced how later thinkers distinguished legal claims from broader justice.
Claim-right: A right that correlates with another party's duty to act or refrain from acting. It makes the question of who owes what central to evaluating a proposed right.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A 1948 United Nations declaration setting out a common standard of human rights. It presents universal entitlements in a document that is not itself a treaty.
Cultural relativism: The view that moral standards depend on cultural contexts rather than universal principles. It challenges claims that natural rights apply identically across societies.