Human Rights

Roman legal concepts and terminology carried over into the Christian era in Europe, albeit with important changes and additions. Medieval canon (church) lawyers and Scholastic philosophers insisted that God endowed human beings with basic rights regarding themselves and those goods they required to preserve their divinely created lives. Some recent scholars, most notably Brian Tierney (1997), have identified in the work of twelfth-and thirteenth-century canonists a consistent distinction between "subjective" and "objective" rights. The former resemble modern "natural rights" to life, liberty, and estate, while the latter are moral duties imposed by God regarding fellow human beings. The canonistic texts generally do not support the presence of a rigid and thoroughly examined separation between "subjective" and "objective" components of iura (rights), and no canonist developed a complete theoretical argument on the basis of the distinction. Yet, there is certainly evidence that church lawyers sometimes sought to develop a principle of human rights compatible with human freedom, a connection also central to an encompassing human rights theory.

Many attempts have been made to identify the "first" theorist of human or natural rights in the Middle Ages. The Scholastic philosophers/theologians Jean de Paris (c. 1255–1306), William of Ockham (c. 1285–?1349), and Jean Gerson (1363–1429) have been among the candidates. Several participants in the fourteenth-century controversy between the papacy and the members of the spiritual wing of the Franciscan order over the status of voluntary ecclesiastical poverty also moved the debate about the humanness of property ownership in the direction of a theory of rights. Yet, in each instance, some of the elements central to a fully "subjective" or individualistic doctrine of human rights associated with modern thought are absent.

It is perhaps best to examine the development of the theory of human rights as an incremental process. Various thinkers contributed important dimensions to its history without necessarily enunciating the idea in its final form or perhaps even appreciating the wider significance of their particular contributions. One such source may be found in the work of a group of theologians of a Thomist orientation working at the University of Paris in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, most prominently Konrad Summenhart (c. 1455–1502), John Mair (1469–1550), and Jacques Almain (c. 1480–1515). In a number of writings, these authors equated ius with dominium (lordship or ownership), which was understood to reside in people naturally and to license in them the power or faculty of acquiring those objects necessary for self-preservation. Their argument was as much theological as legal or philosophical: just as God enjoyed ultimate ownership of the earth and the rest of his creations by virtue of his will, so human beings, in whom God's image resided, could claim dominion over themselves and their property.