 There has been a long and divisive scholarly inquiry into when our modern, subjective sense of “a right” became established as a meaning of some word or phrase. The history is uncertain partly because the ancient authors often used words imprecisely, and smeared their meanings across and beyond the Hohfeldian categories. The intellectual historians themselves have occasionally congested the discussion by taking different features of rights as definitive of the modern concept. Moreover, the scholarly debate has sometimes accepted over-optimistic assumptions about the sharpness of conceptual boundaries.