Civil rights are those rights developed by citizens over time and sometimes protected by governments. Examples of rights and liberties include the right to get redress if injured by another, the right to privacy, the right of peaceful protest, the right to a fair investigation and trial if suspected of a crime, and more generally-based constitutional rights such as the right to vote, the right to personal freedom, the right to life, the right to freedom of movement and anti-discrimination laws. As civilisations emerged and formalised through written constitutions, some of the more important civil rights were granted to citizens. When those grants were later found inadequate, civil rights movements emerged as the vehicle for claiming more equal protection for all citizens and advocating new laws to limit the effect of current discriminations.
Civil rights can in one sense refer to the equal treatment of all citizens irrespective of race, sex, or other class, or it can refer to laws which invoke claims of positive liberty. An example of the former would be the decision in Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954) which was concerned with the constitutionality of laws which imposed segregation in the education systems of some U.S states. The theories set out below explain why such laws should not be considered legitimate, but do not explain why the case failed to declare the general principle that all manifestations of segregation were a breach of civil rights (that would be more properly a question of politics). The U.S. legislature subsequently addressed the issue through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Sec. 201. which states: (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin. Some other countries have enacted similar legislation, or have given direct effect to supranational agrements such as the European Convention on Human Rights (with forty-five countries as signatories), which encompass both human rights and civil liberties.
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