Rights and the Criminal Law
According to Judith Jarvis Thomson ([11, p. If.), there are many rights that we have against others prior to the law recognizing those rights. And if the law did not recognize them we should still have them. However, she says, the law does recognize many of them. Indeed, according to Thomson, the law actually assigns these rights to us. 'For example, I have a right against you that you not break my nose. The criminal law assigns me that right against you in that it proscribes nose-breaking.' In the same way, according to Thomson, the law assigns to me a right against you that you not murder me, and, indeed, it would be defective if it did not. And she goes further: 'A legal system that does not assign to anyone governed by it a right not to be killed by others is perhaps not even an imaginable system.' ([1], p. 2; see also p. 74.) I shall suggest, on the contrary, that such a legal system is not only imaginable but actual; the American and British legal systems, for instance, are such systems. In those systems, the criminal law does not assign to citizens rights against others that they not aggress against them; nor does it even recognize in any way rights of individuals against other individuals not to be aggressed against. The civil law may do so; but not to the extent that would make Thomson's claim correct.