Notes

Civil liberties are freedoms that protect an individual from the government of the nation in which they reside. Civil liberties set limits for government so that it cannot abuse its power and interfere unduly with the lives of its citizens. Common civil liberties include the rights of people, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, and additionally, the right to due process, to a fair trial, to own property, and to privacy.
The formal concept of civil liberties dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215 which in turn was based on pre-existing documents.
Democratic Republics such as the United States have a Constitution, a bill of rights and similar constitutional documents that enumerate and seek to guarantee civil liberties. Other states have enacted similar laws through a variety of legal means, including signing and ratifying or otherwise giving effect to key conventions such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.It might be said that the protection of civil liberties is a key responsibility of all citizens of free states, as distinct from authoritarian states.The existence of some claimed civil liberties is a matter of dispute, as are the extent of most civil rights. Controversial examples include reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and the right to keep and bear arms. Whether the existence of victimless crimes infringes upon civil liberties is a matter of dispute. Another matter of debate is the suspension or alteration of certain civil liberties in times of war or state of emergency, including whether and to what extent this should occur.
Claim rights and liberty rights - A liberty right grants permission, e.g. freedom of speech, whereas a claim right grants an entitlement, e.g. the right to life. Claim rights and liberty rights might be thought of as necessarily imposing constraints or obligations on the other. On the one hand, claim rights restrict other agents' liberty rights to affect the object of the claim. For instance, a claim right to a trial by jury constrains a ruler's liberty right to unilaterally jail whomever he sees fit. On the other hand, a liberty right constrains (but does not totally preclude) the exercise of claim rights on all necessary conditions for the exercise of that liberty. Examples of this are difficult to establish because of the difficulty of establishing necessary conditions for exercising a particular liberty right. One possible modern example might be a liberty right to freedom of movement, which restricts the claim rights one might exercise over the roads (as a necessary condition for freedom of movement). It should also be noted that liberty rights, as permissions, are also known simply as liberties, but are still frequently referred to as rights (e.g. "I have a right to do x" often means "I am permitted to do x"), though some deny that such usage is proper.
Negative rights and positive rights - Negative rights require inaction from others (in the sense of rights as claims or entitlements), or permit inaction from the right bearer (in the sense of rights as liberties or permissions). Conversely, positive rights require action from others (in the sense of rights as claims or entitlements) or permit action from the right bearer (in the sense of rights as liberties or permissions).
Individual rights and group rights - Individual rights are rights pertaining to individuals, regardless of their membership within a group. Group rights, in contrast are held by an ensemble of people collectively, or by the members of a group of people who have a certain characteristic in common. In some cases there can be tension between individual and group rights. A classic instance in which group and individual rights clash is conflicts between unions and their members. For example, members of a union may wish to contract with the employer for a wage other than that negotiated by the union, but are unable to due to the union's control of the work sphere, sometimes referred to as a "closed shop."
Absolute rights and conditional rights - Absolute rights are those rights applied without contingencies. Conditional rights are granted only after meeting certain requirements. The ability to carry weapons might be a conditional right; the right to subsistence provisions might be an absolute right.[citation needed]
Other distinctions between rights draw more on historical association or family resemblance than on precise philosophical distinctions. These include the distinction between civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, between which the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are often divided. Another conception of rights groups them into three generations. These distinctions have much overlap with that between negative and positive rights, as well as between individual rights and group rights, but these groupings are not entirely coextensive.