A didactic description of charge and spin equilibrium currents on mesoscopic rings in the presence of spin–orbit interaction is presented. Emphasis is made on the non-trivial construction of the correct Hamiltonian in polar coordinates, the calculation of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions and the symmetries of the ground-state properties. Spin currents are derived following an intuitive definition, and then a more thorough derivation is built upon the canonical Lagrangian formulation that emphasizes the SU (2) gauge structure of the transport problem of spin-1/2 fermions in spin–orbit active media. The quantization conditions that follow from the constraint of single-valued Pauli spinors are also discussed. The targeted students are those of a graduate condensed matter physics course.