Why Are Legal Rights Important?
To answer this question, we should go back to the times when laws were first created.
You can discover the first seeds of laws in the ancient Egyptian dating as far back as 3000 BC By the end of the 22nd century BC, the ancient Sumerian ruler Ur-Nammu created the first law code, but the philosophy behind the laws is best explained in Hobbes's ''Leviathan'' published in 1651.
Hobbes's ''Leviathan'' thoroughly explains why people needed laws. It says that ''man is a wolf to man'' and that people cannot come to an agreement because they have instincts that make them act like beasts. So you need a third party to protect them from each other. They surrender to the sovereign – to the Leviathan which protects its subjects and their property in an exchange to their natural liberty. In other words, ''Leviathan is a peaceful response to the instincts of human destruction.''
Although what Hobbes describes is absolute surrender to the sovereign, it builds the way to tyranny. To avoid the tyranny of the sovereign, people created legal rights and freedoms that come to protect them. The right to free speech, to practice religion, to avoid unwarranted seizures of property, to peaceful assembly. Sometimes, people are ready to sacrifice civil liberties in emergencies, but normally civil liberties ensure our right to freedom even though there are limits to this freedom in return for protection.
Even though we consent to give part of our rights to the sovereign or the government, we don't want the government to become a tyranny.
We want to have legal rights that will ensure our freedoms and privileges.
That is why people choose democracy as a form of government, and this is the reason why they write constitutions as the supreme law that governs all social and political relations.
Know Your Legal Rights
While we are required to live by the law, we also want to benefit from legal rights when necessary. But you cannot benefit from your legal rights unless you know and understand them. You should know your rights whether the police arrest, question, or detain you, either you buy a simple washing machine at a shop or your boss wants to fire you.
Broadly speaking there are three groups of rights: civil rights, political rights, and economic rights. Civil rights apply to the rights to life, liberty, and equality. The state must protect these rights. People also have political rights like the right to hold public office and the right to criticize and oppose the government. There are also economic rights which relate to things like medical treatment, adequate food, or shelter. These include the right to work, to earn wages that can not be below the minimum, the right to leisure, the right to social welfare, and more.
‘’The right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice’’, and this is what all democracies are claiming to protect.
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