Gratian, the Canonists and the Birth of Rights Talk

Around 1140 a teacher at Bologna known as Gratian compiled thousands of church texts into a single textbook, the Concordance of Discordant Canons, usually called the Decretum. It opened by stating that humankind is ruled by two things, natural law and custom, and borrowed Isidore of Seville's definition of natural law as 'common to all nations'. Commentators on Gratian, called canonists or decretists, debated what natural law meant and began using the word ius to describe a power or faculty belonging to a person.

Some argued that a poor person in extreme need had a right to take what was necessary to survive, because property arrangements could not override the basic needs of life. Historian Brian Tierney argued in 1997 that this was the true beginning of natural rights language, centuries before Locke. Others think the medieval usage was narrower. Either way, the canonists show that rights thinking grew from careful legal scholarship, not only from revolutionary pamphlets.