On September 6, 1884, three British seamen were arrested at the port of Falmouth and charged with the murder of the fourth member of their crew while adrift in a dinghy in the South Atlantic. On June 16, 1987, George Washington University Hospital sought a declaratory order from the District of Columbia Superior Court instructing the hospital whether to perform a Caesarean section on Angela Carder, a young woman in her twenty-sixth week of pregnancy who was dying of lung cancer. These two seemingly unrelated events have much to tell us about the changing concept of rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence. For, each gave rise to a case whose resolution required a court to construe the fundamental rights of the parties involved; and, in each case, the construction of these rights was literally a matter of life and death. Yet a radically different conception of rights emerged from each. For this reason, these cases are ideally designed to illustrate just how much the legal conception of a fundamental right has changed over the last century