 Nonetheless, despite the differences in linguistic usage to which the two ideas of civil rights give rise, there is no substantive incompatibility between them. In fact, the older idea subsumes the more recent, on any morally plausible view: it cannot be reasonably denied that the rights constitutive of free and equal citizenship encompass, and go beyond, rights against discrimination. But because discrimination remains a persistent and widely-discussed source of systemic injustice, the standard idea identifying civil rights with rights against discrimination is unlikely to fade in the foreseeable future. Yet, the older idea of civil rights is by no means superannuated: it remains indispensable to legal and political discourse, functioning often as part of the implicit normative background and sometimes as an explicitly articulated subject of the discourse. This entry will follow the older idea, treating all of the rights of free and equal citizens as civil rights; at the same time, the entry gives special attention to current controversies in which rights against discrimination are at issue.