ABSTRACT
In Amartya Sen’s usage (1981), ‘entitlements’ refer to the ability of persons to acquire access to food and other goods through the legal channels established in a society. These might include self-provisioning on the basis of direct control of the resources needed for livelihood and the exchange of money for goods on the market, but they also include claims on the state, acquired through the official recognition of public claims and rights. To the extent that ‘rights’ are legislated, they apply to defined categories of persons. National states may extend or circumscribe the rights of aliens who find themselves within their borders through legislation, and they may also subscribe to international agreements on the rights that non-citizens or foreign corporate entities should enjoy within their jurisdictions.1 The ‘citizen’ is, however, the most inclusive category routinely involved in the specification of rights and entitlements at the level of national legislation, and much of the social legislation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was applied to more restricted categories, such as organized labour.
