Natural and legal rights are two types of rights theoretically distinct according to philosophers and political scientists. Natural rights are rights not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and therefore universal and inalienable. In contrast, legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by the law of a particular political and legal system, and therefore relative to specific cultures and governments.

Legal rights may be constitutional, statutory, regulatory, contractual, common-law, or conferred by international human rights law. Legal rights are almost always qualified, whether by implication, by the law which created the right itself or by legal rights held by others. A legal right can be enforced in courts of law against another who has infringed the right. The right may be enforced by a court order or injunction prohibiting the other person or persons from infringing a right, by the awarding of money to compensate the holder of the right. If a person's right to liberty is infringed, he or she may bring an action of habeas corpus so that a court can order his or her release. The owner of the copyright in a work may seek monetary compensation against someone who copied the work without permission. A landowner whose land is being used without his or her permission may bring an action for trespass. A worker may sue his or her employer for breach of contract if the employer refuses to pay the employee's wages.

Andrew Paolo Napolitano (born June 6, 1950) is a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge. He is a political and senior judicial analyst for Fox News Channel, commenting on legal news and trials. Napolitano started on the channel in 1998.

Napolitano was born in Newark, New Jersey. He is a graduate of Princeton University (he was a founding member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton) and Notre Dame Law School. Napolitano sat on the New Jersey bench from 1987 to 1995, becoming the state's youngest then-sitting Superior Court judge. He also served as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University School of Law for 11 years. Napolitano resigned his judgeship in 1995 to pursue his writing and television career.

Prior to joining Fox as a news analyst, Napolitano was the presiding judge on the television show, Power of Attorney, in which people brought small-claims disputes to a televised courtroom. Differing from similar formats, the plaintiffs and defendants were represented "pro bono" by famous attorneys. The show ran in syndication during the 2000–2001 season.

John Locke FRS ( /ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.