Legal principles are based on the rights of citizens and the state, expressed in the norms. Morality is a set of principles that attempt to define what is good and bad behavior. Judges regularly rely on legal rights to determine the outcome of criminal and civil cases. A judge could apply civil law that protects citizens' rights against government abuses.
People have other legal rights, such as making a will or signing contracts, depending on customs and culture. Therefore, one of the most important characteristics of legal rights is that they are formulated by the state or government in accordance with the desire of the majority for the common good of its citizens. Therefore, they are not universal or timeless like human rights and moral rights. However, they affect all citizens of that particular state, whether citizens are publicly aware that they exist or not.
They appear in laws, constitutions, statutes, laws, etc. The first thing to highlight is the relationship between moral duties, on the one hand, and moral rights, on the other. Some of our obligations are so important that they involve rights. Two of the defining characteristics of moral rights (others will be discussed later) contradict what has just been said about legal rights.
First of all, human beings do not create moral rights, nor can we undo those rights. Second, moral rights are not limited to the citizens of a particular nation, at any given time. Moral rights (for example, our rights to life, liberty, and bodily integrity) are universal and timeless. Natural rights are moral rights that human beings (in the moral sense) have by their nature or by virtue of being human.
Therefore, the term (historical) natural rights and the term (contemporary) human rights are synonymous. It is sometimes said that natural rights are rights that human beings have, or would have, in a prepolitical “state of nature”. But this is simply a consequence of the fact that they are moral rights that human beings have by their nature, unlike not only legal and other conventional rights, but also civil rights. For example, even if a person does not have a specific legal right (the right to “walk” on a public street), the privilege to do so is largely guaranteed by several legal prohibitions on conduct that could interfere with the enjoyment of that privilege, such as crimes and torts of assault, privacy, harassment, assault, and unlawful imprisonment.
However, whether or not the courts or the legislator are right from the point of view of the law in recognizing José's right is a question of legal justification, for example, whether the right is implicit in another, more general rule or legal principle, or if it is approved by the Constitution. Consequently, given the influence (especially in the last 150 years) of approaches to political morality based on consequentialist considerations of utility, public policy, or the common good, it is not surprising to find occasions in which legal rights have gone from being important legal reasons to merely containers for the legalistic expression of the underlying public policy. Therefore, it is not clear what independent freedoms mean for supposed rights holders; at least not in a legal system where freedom is the default legal position (that is, unless it is outright prohibited, reproduction is allowed). For example, it could be said that the legal right to due process of law or the legal right to vote are partly justified in their role as a means of fulfilling a variety of moral rights, such as, for example, the rights to dignity and freedom.
Notice that this conception of legal validity and justification derives from the tradition of legal positivism in general jurisprudence. In fact, very often it is the interests or dignity of the parties to a legal dispute that guide the courts in reaching a decision, which is then expressed in terms of the scope of the parties' relevant legal “rights”. However, according to this approach, much of what determines what the law is are not considerations about law but about the parameters of rights, which reduces the role of legal rights as legal reasons and brings them closer to “right” as a result. The most obvious thing is that legal officials incorporate legal rights into their deliberations about what the law is in a particular case.
In any case, dividing legal rights into Hohfeldian positions is an excellent clarification tool, as it provides an accurate picture of the legal relationships at stake. There is a voluminous and diverse literature on the moral justification of legal rights and on the defense of what the regulatory content of legal rights should be. Broadly speaking, there are two main legal mechanisms for the creation (or deprivation) of (valid) legal rights. The more skeptical one is about the notion of legal reasons, the more likely one is to view “legal rights” as empty formalist rhetoric and less as genuine reasons for legal determinations (p.
A (valid) rule of law is a legal right if, and only if, it exhibits the form (section) and function (section) of the more general category of a “right”. The more those views dominate the content of legal rights, the more likely it is that those who disregard natural rights and deontology will become hostile to treating legal rights as reasons. .
