Debate Central : The Classical Liberal Concept of Individual Rights

The National Center for Policy Analysis has a background paper for high school debaters that looks at what sorts of rights people are supposed to have, with a tie-in to American history:

The Bill of Rights proclaims that individuals have “rights.” But what does it mean to have a right? Are some rights fundamentally different from others? Where do rights come from? How can they be defended? These are some of the questions we seek to answer in the following discussion of the classical liberal concept of rights – a concept that permeates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and many other documents produced by the people who created the American system of government...

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