ABSTRACT
We live in an age in which it has become common for people in democratic societies to invoke the concept of rights in political discourse. We talk of the rights of individual citizens, the rights of categories of citizens like children or women or pensioners, and the rights of groups within society like ethnic and cultural minorities. Outside the United States, this kind of talk was not very common in the first half of the twentieth century. Lawyers talked about rights and so did people involved in legal cases, but people engaged in political debate found it more natural to talk in terms of interests, needs and welfare. Americans have always tended to place more emphasis on rights, partly because their society is more individualistic than that of other democracies, but mainly because of the great importance in American political life of the Bill of Rights, added to the constitution in 1791 and invoked and redefined endlessly since that date. The separation of powers has given the American judiciary more influence on politics than has been possible in other democracies, which are all parliamentary in character and tied to the concept of parliamentary sovereignty.
