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Characteristics of Rights
Characteristics of Rights
Characteristics of Rights
Characteristics of Rights
⚫ The holder of the right
⚫ The act of forbearance
⚫ The res (object of the right)
⚫ Tangible object?
⚫ Intangible but valuable?
⚫ Person?
⚫ The person bound by the duty
⚫ Title to the right
⚫ Enforceability
⚫ Time barred debt
⚫ Right may mean a number of different things
⚫ Moral
⚫ Political
⚫ Economic
⚫ Legal
⚫ Wesley Newcombe Hohfeld (1879-1917)
⚫ Fundamental Legal Conceptions Applied to Judicial
Reasoning (1919)
⚫ Explained the lowest common denominators of law –
basic legal conceptions – he found 8
⚫ Right – an enforceable claim to performance, action or
forbearance by another
⚫ Right to marry
⚫ Power – the legal relation of A and B when A’s own
voluntary act will cause new legal relations either between
B and A or between A and a third person
Right Privilege
Duty No-Right
Power Immunity
Liability Disability
⚫ Correlatives always exist together – one person has a right
the other has a duty
⚫ Contradictories – when one is held by one person then
another lacks its contradictory – if A has power B cannot
have immunity
⚫ Opposites can never be held by one person at the same
time – one has a privilege with respect to a subject he
cannot simultaneously be subject to a duty – Thus right in
X implies absence of liberty in himself
Four basic rights - LCD
⚫ Right – claim rights
⚫ Privilege – that are in fact liberties
⚫ Power – ability to create change in legal relations with
another
⚫ Immunity – rights protecting persons from interference in
a specific way
• Positive Rights correspond to a positive duty – right to be
positively benefited
• Negative rights correspond to a negative duty – right not to be
harmed