While I wouldn't be surprised if there is a body of scholarship that uses the terms "
positive rights" and "
negative rights" as described above, i.e. positive=
alienable, negative=
inalienable, readers should be aware that there is also a completely different meaning for these terms.
"Positive Rights" and "Negative Rights" has also been used in to describe how rights of any kind (alienable or inalienable) are
enumerated. In the
U.K., rights are enumerated thus: you are
prohibited from doing X, Y, and Z. Anything that isn't prohibited, you have the right to do. Hence rights in the UK may be said to be negative, meaning unenumerated, rather than positive, meaning enumerated in a
sovereign, super-Parliamentary document. This has some interesting implications: The
Parliament can (and does) exercise its authority at any time to ban a specific book. In theory, it could use the very same authority to restrict an entire category of rights, although in practice this is about as un
precedented as amending the US Constitution. An over-simplification, no doubt, but good enough for the current discussion. For most of English history there has been no "founding document" per se that defines one's rights -- rather these rights are based in centuries of accumulated legal tradition, see
Common Law for an excellent discussion. A further example: the English
Petition of Right, drafted in 1628, was, as I understand it, "just" another law enacted by Parliament and accepted by the Monarch. Under the doctrine of
Parliamentary sovereignty, there never could be a master document passed by Parliament that binds future Parliaments. However, under the
European Union (
EU), this doctrine may be changing.
This is in marked contrast to the
US Constitution, which is itself sovereign, and from which Congress draws its authority, and which lists specific, positive rights that one has, no matter what the Legislature may say. Outright banning of a book, for example, could in theory never happen without amending the Constitution.
The difference between inalienable rights, such as the right to
free speech, where my exercising my right in theory does not infringe upon my neighbors right of free speech, and alienable rights, such as a right to shelter, where in theory my exercising my right involves a "
taking" of someone else's house, is an important difference. But readers should be aware, that difference isn't the only thing that a writer could mean when they write about negative and positive rights.
For another, subtly different distinction between types of rights, see
Two Concepts of Liberty and follow the soft-links. For an enthusiastic defense of negative rights, enjoy
The Bill of Not Rights.