Rights and Privileges: The History of Shifting Meaning in
Legal Language
This essay begins by examining the similar meanings of the words right,
privilege, and liberty in the legal language of the late Middle Ages. As political
and intellectual developments led to the modern notion of egalitarian
citizenship based on individualism, right and privilege increasingly took on
divergent connotations. This introduction traces that development and asks a
final question: does the study of different legal cultures and traditions logically
lead to extreme and perhaps dangerous relativism? Is it true that «The
rightfulness of an act cannot be judged if not on the basis of the values of the
societies which it refers to?».