  The answer will often turn upon whether one embraces an interest- or a choice-theory of rights. MacCormick (1976), for example, argued that any theory of rights which could not accommodate children’s rights must be deficient, and this was a reason, in his view, for adopting an interest theory. Wellman (1995), on the other hand, claims that to assert that very young children or the severely mentally ill can have legal rights is to distort the concept of a right, since they lack the relevant control of the legal machinery. Instead, he argues, the relevant rights should be seen as belonging only to those who can bring the relevant actions on their behalf. For example, in his view a very young child would not have a right not to be negligently injured by the conduct of another. Rather, it would be the case that the child’s parent had a right that their child not be negligently injured. One difficulty about this position appears to be that it does not easily square with the relevant remedial rights (e.g., to damages) that the law would recognise. In this example the law would clearly compensate the child’s loss in being injured, not the parent’s loss in their child being injured (though the latter might be a separate ground of action in some systems).