What are legal rights? And who has them? 

In answering these questions, we tend to make the mistake of thinking of the present as being characteristic of what always was and always will be. But consider the evolution of the concepts of the "Rights of Man".

THE RIGHTS OF MAN CONCEPT

Our belief in the American way of life and the concepts on which our society or government is based should not obscure the fact that at one time there was no American way of life and that the concept of man possessing rights recognized by government was the fruit of more than a revolution---it was a product of creation. While many religious leaders, philosophers, and poets spoke of the rights of man and the dignity of man, governments laughed at such pretensions and held man tightly in a society based on status. If he were a nobleman, he had the rights of a nobleman of his degree. If he were a warrior, he had the rights of a warrior. If a slave, he had very few rights at all. In each case, the law only saw status; it was not the man who had rights but the status of the nobleman, the status of the warrior, the status of the slave.

In the course of time, serfdom displaced slavery in much of the Western world. Eventually feudalism disappeared and, with the end of the Thirty Years War, the modern society of nations began to emerge. Surely one might say that in such a "new order" man had legal rights. No, not as a man but as a subject. Even when the English colonists settled in America, they brought with them not the rights of men but the rights of British subjects. Even when the colonies were within one year of war, their Second Continental Congress presented to King George III the Olive Branch Petition in which they beseeched him to recognize their rights as Englishmen. For almost a year the destiny of the colonies hung in the balance as to whether they should stay within the empire, seeking to obtain recognition of their rights as Englishmen, a "status" recognition, or whether they should do something more.

Finally, the ill-advised policies of George III and the eloquence of Thomas Paine's Common Sense tipped the scales and the colonies spoke on July 4, 1776, not in the terms of the rights of English subjects, but in terms of the rights of man existing independently of any government. Had the American Revolution been lost, the Declaration of Independence would have gone rattling down the corridors of time with many other failures. But the American Revolution was won, and the new government that was established was based upon "man" as the building block rather than upon "subjects." Rights of man replaced the concept of rights of subjects. With this transition, the obligations of a king to his faithful subjects were replaced by the rights of man existing without regard to the will or authority of any king. Since then, America has gone through additional stages of determining what is embraced by the concept of "rights of man", and many changes have occurred along the way.  And though there have been times we have struggled to find the right way, it remains a challenge that America will forever be up to facing head on.