Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879-1918) was the author of the seminal Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays. During his life, he published only a few law journal articles. At his death, the material forming the basis of Fundamental Legal Conceptions was derived from two articles in the Yale Law Journal (1913) and (1917) that had been partially revised with a view to publication. Editorial work was undertaken to complete the revisions and the book was published with the inclusion of the manuscript notes that Hohfeld had left, plus seven other essays. Although published in 1919, the work is a powerful contribution to our modern understanding of the nature of rights and the implications of liberty. To reflect this continuing importance, a chair at Yale University is named after him.

Hohfeld, Professor of Jurisprudence

Jurisprudence is that branch of philosophy dealing with the principles of law and the legal systems through which it is applied. Hohfeld's contribution was to engage in a very precise form of analysis which distinguished between concepts and specified a framework of relationships for those concepts. His work offers a sophisticated method for deconstructing broad legal and moral principles into their component elements, thereby illuminating policy implications and identifying issues to be resolved in practical decision making.

His analysis began by distinguishing right (or claim) from liberty (or privilege), power and immunity, and defined them through three corelatives, i.e. duty, liability, and disability. Previously, the concept of right had been defined in ambiguous terms. Put simply, Hohfeld argued that right and duty are corelative concepts, i.e. the one must always be matched by the other. If A has a right against B, this is meaningless unless B has a duty to honour A's right. If B has no duty, that means that B has liberty, i.e. B can do whatever he or she pleases because B has no duty to refrain from doing it, and A has no right to prohibit B from doing so. Each individual is located within a matrix of relationships with other individuals. By summing the rights held and duties owed across all these relationships, the analyst can identify both the degree of liberty — an individual would be considered to have perfect liberty if it is shown that no-one has a right to prevent the given act — and whether the concept of liberty is comprised by commonly followed practices, thereby establishing general moral principles and civil rights.

It can therefore be seen that Hohfeld defines the corelatives in terms of the relationships between two individuals. This does not necessarily eliminate relationships that arise in rem, i.e. an owner of land may acquire rights against the world, say, to exclude trespassers, but he intended his primary focus to be the mechanisms for adjusting human interactions. Consider the definition of liberty. It is defined by an absence both of a duty and of a right. B is free because he has no obligation to recognise any of A's rights. That does not deny that B might decide to do what A wants because that is the essence of liberty. Nor does it deny the possibility that B might accept a duty to A to give a benefit to C. In that situation, C would have no right and would have to rely on A to enforce the duty. The truth is that liberty is significant from both a legal and a moral point of view because only liberty ensures that an individual has control over his or her choices on whether and how to act. If something interferes with this choice, the natural reaction is to resent it and to seek a remedy. The corelative between right and duty inevitably describes the way in which two people are limited in their choices to act, and the outside observer cannot capture the legal and moral implications without examining the nature of the right held by A. Hence, this relationship is qualitatively different. An interference with liberty would be considered wrongful without having to ask for detailed evidence. Yet whether A's relationship with B is morally suspect could only be determined by evaluating evidence on precisely what B's duty requires B to do or not to do.

See also

Civil rights.