ABSTRACT
There has been, especially in recent decades, a copious flow of demands for ascribing rights to collective entities that, unlike states, cities, or corporations, have no formally constituted legal personality and in some cases could hardly have one. Groups that can be distinguished from neighboring, or surrounding, populations by shared religious, racial, linguistic, gender, or age characteristics, and by “cultural” practices in an ever widening sense of the word, encompassing anything from nomadic grazing to homosexual marriage, are asserted to have a variety of rights designed to preserve and perhaps to accentuate their separate identity. The rights would accomplish this by protecting and fostering their key distinguishing features. If such groups lack these rights, it is being urged that the lack be remedied. In this type of discourse, it is seldom specified how and by whom the rights should, and could, be accorded and how, once accorded, they should or could be enforced. Implicit in the demand, however, is that political arrangements ought to be adjusted, or new ones made, to accommodate the rights and their enforcement.
