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[ Music ]
>> Hello again everybody.
We are now in week 2, lesson 2, as it's in your course materials.
And this week we're going to be doing what I think will be some very interesting things.
Our goal this week is to understand a simple idea - that rights are defined
in many different ways, in many different documents, in different political systems,
and how rights are also defined back in the 18th century are different
than our rights are defined in the 21st century.
Our vehicle for doing this will be an exploration of various documents
that you have available to you, that will help illustrate the problem of the definition
of rights, and the evolution of rights.
One document of course will be the American Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights.
But to give you a feel for how other documents define rights,
you're also going to be reading some state constitutions.
In fact, the Pennsylvania state constitution will be 1 of them,
and also the Florida constitution.
2 documents that have declarations of rights in them, and as you'll see,
different people at different times and places enumerate rights in different ways,
and this gives us a really good impression about how rights evolve differentially
across different political units.
Now 1 other thing we'll be doing will be looking at the definition of rights
in the contemporary era, by looking at the European Union's Declaration of Rights.
And what you're going to be seeing there in their documents
that have become the founding elements of the European Union, will be the much broader array
of rights and a much different definition of what these rights are all about.
So as you read these different documents, it's important to look at the nature of the rights,
how they're defined, what I might call both the quantity and the quality
of the rights you find in these documents.
Enjoy.