Hohfeld's analysis
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (Fundamental Legal Conceptions, 1913 and 1917) argued that the word “right” is used loosely for four different relations. He set out four pairs of correlatives: right and duty, privilege (liberty) and no-right, power and liability, immunity and disability. If A has a right that B pay him, B has a duty to pay; if A has a privilege to enter his land, others have no-right that he stay out.
He also gave four pairs of opposites: right and no-right, privilege and duty, power and disability, immunity and liability. The value of the analysis is precision: a student can identify, for instance, that the power to make a will creates a liability in the heirs, while the rule that Parliament cannot abridge a fundamental right is an immunity of the citizen and a disability of the State.
Example
Under Hohfeld's analysis, a landlord's power to terminate a lease corresponds to the tenant's liability to have his interest ended.
See also
right · legal positivism · jurisprudence · legal realism
Read more in the study notes
- Legal rights and duties: elements, kinds and Hohfeld's analysis (Jurisprudence)
- Computation of limitation: exclusion of time, fraud, acknowledgment, part-payment and continuing wrongs (Civil Procedure Code and Limitation Act)
- Concept of Property and Its Evolution (IPR II)
- Rights: conception, definition, characteristics and kinds (Legal Concepts)
- Hohfeld's jural relations and their critique (Legal Concepts)
- Temporal dimensions of rights and legal relations (Legal Concepts)