See query. It happens that this is a spinoff on a current OP with “equal rights” in the title, but that’s a coincidence.
Do I have a right to not be run down by a car when I have the green light and he doesn’t?
Or is this just the law?
Even though the Declaration recognizes we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–and “life” certainly applies to rules of the road–I’m uncomfortable with the promiscuity of the term.
(Last year an irate neighbor told me he had a civil right (his words) to get to his apartment without my unleashed dog sniffing his pants. Upsetting him, and against NYC law for sure.)
I agree with Exapno Mapcase from a philosophical standpoint, but I’d clarify that from a strictly legal (and US-centric) view a “right” refers to an individual’s entitlement to do something, as laid out in the Constitution. In that sense, one has the “right” to free speech because the government is prohibited from abridging free speech by the First Amendment of the Constitution, but one does not have a “right” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because these rights are not enumerated in the Constitution. While they appear in the Declaration of Independence, that document is not part of the Constitution, and has no force of law. You can’t cite it as binding authority in a court brief (but you might get away with citing it as a guiding principle to help convince the court of your interpretation of a proper right enumerated in the Constitution).
In that sense, Leo Bloom doesn’t have a right to not be run down by a car when he has a green light, because the US Constitution (or the NY State Constitution) does not provide for a right not to be run down by a car. NY State (or the NYC) may pass a law that prohibits running of red lights, so he would be protected under that statute or code. But he doesn’t have a “right” not to be run down in the sense that he describes.
Generally, but not exclusively, rights are secured by The People against the government, while laws can be either a restriction on government action or a restriction on the actions of citizens.
The government, very loosely, cannot stop you from publishing your ideas. The SDMB, otoh, is not required to provide you with a platform for speaking, and can shut you down for any reason or no reason.
The first amendment to the Constitution says, among other things, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” This guarantees the right of free speech without going into any detail about what that means. The exact meaning has been worked out over time by various courts and legislatures.
Compare that with the laws protecting you from being run over by a car. Each state has laws detailing who is allowed to do what in traffic, which help determine who is at fault when someone is injured by a car. These laws are complicated, and don’t always assign blame when someone is injured or killed. For instance, if a driver loses control of his car due to a heart attack, he may not have violated any law if he injures or kills you as a result (he could still be civilly liable, which is a different question). So, the law doesn’t give you a right not to be run over. Lawmakers try to minimize the chance that this will happen, but the law doesn’t eliminate all cases.
Also, generally speaking, rights restrict what the government can do. The Bill of Rights lists a set of restrictions on government power. Some of the rights limit the government’s ability to pass certain types of laws, while others limit what the courts can do (e.g. they can’t compel defendants to testify). Some laws also restrict government power, but most laws restrict or compel behavior of individuals.
One extra-US distinction that comes mind is the southeast Asian concept of “outrage of modesty”, a law that criminalizes acts or speech that are intended to or have the effect of outraging the modesty of a person. Originated by Singapore, this came to attention with respect to upskirt camera shots. It is based on an underlying presumptionn that a person in a pubiic venue has a right to modesty, and criminal law was promulgated to defend that right.
In this sense, a law was written that protects a perceived right of the citizenry instead of the other way around, restricting a right to do as you please as long as it does not cause demonstrable and actionable harm to another person.
Similarly, Singapore’s draconian penalties for what the west perceives as trivial crimes (vandalism, in one celebrated case) puts light on a citizen’s right to live in a peaceful ordered society without fear of hooligans.
Aside, I’m surprised the Napoleonic Code has not yet been addressed in this thread, but I don’t know enough about it to summarize its differences. Louisiana’s state laws are still based on Napoleonic principles.
dofe was construing the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people. The Ninth Amendment says that that shall not be done.
Yes, there was intense opposition to the Bill of Rights as a whole as the Constitution was hammered out, precisely to forestall the necessity for that.
No. As others said, rights don’t control reality. You have a right to complain about being run down, the right to sue for being run down, the right to call for help and so on, but there’s no such thing as a right to any particular reality.
No, it’s not the law, either. It’s illegal to run over someone intentionally, but laws are like rights, in that they don’t cause reality, they specify what can happen if a given reality occurs.
A couple of people have said, but I’ll put it a different way: the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document pertaining to the United States. Part of the reason why it’s language was not included in the Constitution, was that the Constitution was written to knit together slave and free states, so any claim to rights to liberty for one and all, would not have flown.
People invent imaginary rights day in and day out these days. I suspect this is the result of seeing other people making such declarations on TV all the time, and having a press and a government which fails to point out that the people claiming these rights, don’t know what they are talking about.
When all is said and done it’s really just semantics. ‘Rights’ are merely the topmost, most important ‘laws’. So important that, unlike most other laws, they are considered to be self-evident. Imbued on all of humanity, by god if you will (or society as a whole if you prefer), not simply by a governing body or sovereign. In reality, they are interpreted and applied like ‘laws’, just with more vigor and vigilance. Lacking a reliance on a deity to always enforce them, they have to be imposed the same as laws…