Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

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Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879-1918) was an American jurist. He was the author of the seminal Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays, published in 1919.

During his life, he published only a handful of 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.

The work remains a powerful contribution to 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, which is currently held by Jules Coleman.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Examples of Hohfeldian analysis

Hohfeld's 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. He arranged these fundamental legal concepts in terms of Jural Opposites and Jural Corelatives.

The Jural Opposites look like this:

1. Right/No-Right 2. Privilege/Duty 3. Power/Disability 4. Immunity/Liability

The Jural Corelatives look like this:

1. Right/Duty 2. Privilege/No-Right 3. Power/Liability 4. Immunity/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.

Hohfeld defines the corelatives in terms of the relationships between two individuals. In this scheme the concept of "right in rem" is replaced by an aggregate of "multital rights". In the theory of "in rem rights", the legal relationship between a person and a thing is direct, and in relation to this thing the owner has a single right against everyone that everyone respects his right. Real rights are in this respect unlike claim rights or "rights in personam", which by nature must be exercised against a person; the best example being when someone is owed money by another. Hohfeld demonstrates that this way of understanding rights in general and rights applying to things in particular is wrong. A right necessarily applies only to a human relationship. Hence, all the elements of what we call a property right can be defined as an aggregate of jural relations with other people. For example, instead of having a right against "everyone" that they do not step on his land or a right to go on his or her land whenever he or she wants, the landowner has an aggregate of rights, privilege, powers, and immunities against every single other person, that shape his relationship to other persons with respect to the thing. Hohfeld describes those "rights" in the loose sense as "multital rights, privilege, power and immunities", because there is not one single right or power against the rest of the world but rather a multiplication of bilateral and identical jural relationships between the right holder and any other person of the community. For example, the owner indeed has a right that others do not step on his land but there is not just one such right against a mass of person (the community), but a multiplicity of rights with this content (as many instances as there are people in the community). This is what Hohfeld calls "multital rights".

Consider also the definition of liberty. In Hohfeldian analysis, liberty 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.

REFERENCES

Joseph William Singer, The Legal Rights Debate in Analytical Jurisprudence from Bentham to Hohfeld, 1982 Wisconsin Law Review 975.

Curtis Nyquist, Teaching Wesley Hohfeld's Theory of Legal Relations, 52 Journal of Legal Education 238 (2002).