The concept of rights is a prominent feature of modern political thought. The principle that all human beings possess inalienable or imprescriptible rights was endorsed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Previously, natural rights were central to influential political treatises by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), John Locke (1632- 1704), and others. There is a growing consensus that the origins of rights theory can be found in the later Middle Ages, with Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280-c. 1343), William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349?), or Jean de Gerson (1363-1429), or still earlier with twelfth and thirteenth century canon lawyers such as Rufinus, Ricardus, Huguccio, and Alanus.

Some scholars view the rights tradition as reaching all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, or even to the ancient Hebrew Bible, while others regard it as a strictly modern phenomenon, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre: “[T]here is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.” This suggests that the issue involves, in part, the meaning of words.