Birth of a legal Category: Subjective Rights

The paper investigates the question of the origin of subjective rights which represents one of the most debated issues in legal-political scholarship throughout the last decades. Villey was the first to trace the birth of subjective rights to Ockham and the early fourteenth century debate over Franciscan poverty. Such a category would be later developed firstly by authors belonging to Second Scholasticism and secondly by the School of Natural Law. Villey's viewpoint has been rejected in favour of a different chronology which dates back to twelfth-century canon lawyers or, in some case, much earlier still suggesting that the category could have equally emerged in classical Roman jurisprudence.