As I'm slowly learning, the British phrase, "you have every right to..." translates to Americans' "you're welcome to..." It takes me a moment, each time I hear it, to remember that the speaker isn't accusing me of being a jerk.

In American English, you see, telling someone they have a certain right is a kind of sarcasm at least, and possibly a way to start a fight. The perturbed argumentator, for example, might simmer: "Well, you have a right to believe what you want, but..." A parent: "You have every right to scream and swear at me, but you're not going to that concert."

In the American view, I know what my rights are—it's a free world after all—so saying, "You have a right..." suggests that I've abandoned everything else—all other common sense, ties of friendship, and bounds of propriety. To an American ear.

At the bank, for example, I expected the Advice man would welcome me to submit an application, and if, as he says, it's unlikely that I'd get an account, I'd expect him to level with me: "Your welcome to try, but if you don't have a UK credit history, it's not likely." Welcoming me to try and simultaneously laying out the harsh facts—that's what friends do! Telling me my rights, that's what the cops do!

This puts me in mind of the fact that when Japan was opened up to the outside world, in the 1800s, they adopted (whether by enlightenment or coercion, I can't say) an American-modeled constitution, complete with its notion of "individual rights," a concept which had no native word in Japanese. The Japanese people found this a difficult idea to accomodate, as the scholars have it. A "right," it seemed, was some property an individual had no matter how assinine he might behave. What could quite justify such a principle? A man who killed scores of his countrymen in broad daylight had certain actions which he could still perform, and which others should not prevent him from doing?

So it seems to be, after the Enlightenment, and after the American Revolution and the ascendency of all things American, that there are certain properties which, in principle at least, no person can be rightly deprived of.

One is interested to note that in the original Meiji Constitution, "rights of subjects" were posited to the extent that law did not otherwise restrict them. These qualifications were dropped when the Constitution was re-written after WWII, when the American army was disbanding and replacing the Japanese one.