Claim–Liberty Classification Tree¶
Decision support — instantiates Rights–Freedoms Obligation Mapping
Routes each ambiguous 'right' phrase through ordered yes/no questions to a single position type — claim, liberty, power, or immunity — before any detailed mapping begins.
The Claim–Liberty Classification Tree is the intake sorter. It takes one ambiguous statement at a time — "users have a right to be forgotten," "staff are free to work remotely" — and walks it down a short chain of ordered yes/no questions until it lands on exactly one Hohfeldian position type. Its defining move is sequential disambiguation of a single phrase: it does not lay out actor pairs, it does not fill correlative cells, it does not weigh anything. It asks, in order, does another party have to do or refrain from something here? does the bearer merely lack a duty not to act? does the act change someone else's normative standing? is the bearer shielded from someone else's power? — and the first branch that fires assigns the label. The whole value is speed and repeatability at the front door, so that a workshop room full of people stop arguing about the word "right" and start from a shared type.
Example¶
An HR working group is rewriting a company handbook and the draft says "employees have the right to remote work." Before anyone debates policy, the phrase goes down the tree. Must another party act or refrain? If the intent is that a manager must grant it, the tree lands on claim — and flags that a duty-bearer (the manager) and a trigger now need mapping. But the group says no: they mean an employee may request it and a manager may decline. That fails the claim branch. Does the bearer simply have no duty not to ask? Yes — so it is a liberty, and the tree records that the correct handbook wording is "employees are free to request remote work," not "have the right to." One more phrase — "managers may revoke remote-work arrangements" — enters and the tree asks does the act change another's standing? Yes: revocation alters the employee's position, so it is a power, not a liberty, and needs a notice-and-review bound. In fifteen minutes the group has three correctly typed positions and a one-line record of why each was classified, ready to hand to detailed mapping.
How it works¶
- Take one asserted phrase. The unit of work is a single statement about a single bearer's interest, not a whole policy.
- Identify the bearer and the interest first. Name who is said to hold the position and what act or object it concerns; an unnamed bearer usually means the phrase is not yet operational.
- Descend the ordered branches. Duty-on-another? → claim. No-duty-to-refrain? → liberty. Alters-another's-standing? → power. Shielded-from-another's-power? → immunity. First hit wins; genuinely mixed phrases are split into separate statements and re-run.
- Stamp the decision. Record the resulting type, the branch answers that produced it, and any counterpart the branch implied — a short justification, not a full relational map.
Tuning parameters¶
- Branch depth — a four-way triage versus a finer tree that also separates powers from immunities and claims-to-act from claims-to-forbear. Deeper trees classify more precisely but slow the intake.
- Split threshold — how mixed a phrase must be before you decompose it rather than force a single label. A low threshold catches hidden compound rights; too low fragments plain statements.
- Bearer-strictness — whether a phrase with no identifiable bearer is rejected at the door or provisionally admitted. Strict rejection prevents manifesto language; lenient admission keeps aspirational drafts in the conversation.
- Record verbosity — a bare type tag versus a logged branch trace. Fuller traces make later re-review cheap but cost intake time.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is throughput: it converts a slogan into a typed, recorded position in minutes, and its branch trace makes the classification contestable later rather than opaque. Its central failure mode is premature confidence — the first-hit ordering can slam a genuinely compound position into one box, so a statement that is both a liberty to publish and a claim to a working takedown channel gets filed as a bare liberty and its claim half vanishes. The classic misuse is running the tree to manufacture a comfortable label — routing an inconvenient claim down to "liberty" so that no duty-bearer has to be named, which is how a manifesto right gets laundered into "we merely permit it."[n1] The guarding discipline is to treat any phrase that hesitates at a branch as a signal to split rather than force, and to send every "liberty" that smells like it wants provision back through as a candidate claim.
How it implements the components¶
normative_relation_classifier— the tree is the classifier: its branch questions are the typed grammar that assigns claim / liberty / power / immunity to each phrase.affected_interest_and_bearer_map— the first two nodes name the bearer and the interest at stake, so classification starts from a concrete position rather than an abstract noun.normative_relation_decision_record— each leaf stamps the type plus the branch trace that produced it, a durable justification for why the phrase was classified as it was.
The tree types positions one at a time; it does not arrange them into their correlative and opposite cells — that grid is the Hohfeldian Relation Matrix's counterpart_obligation_map and liberty_and_noninterference_zone, its nearest twin — and it never assigns owners, tests constraints, or attaches remedies.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Rights–Freedoms Obligation Mapping — the tree is the intake gate that types positions before any downstream mapping.
- Sibling mechanisms: Hohfeldian Relation Matrix · Counterparty Obligation Register · Rights-Conflict Scenario Table · Least-Restrictive Alternative Screen · Proportionality Balancing Record · Permission–Entitlement Crosswalk · Remedy Traceability Review
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Decision, Gate & Allocation
Rationale: Routes each ambiguous 'right' phrase through ordered yes/no questions to a single position type — claim, liberty, power, or immunity — before any detailed mapping begins, making its operative form a case-specific gate, selection, routing, prioritization, or disposition decision.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Claim–Liberty Classification Tree as 'Routes each ambiguous 'right' phrase through ordered yes/no questions to a single position type — claim, liberty, power, or immunity — before any detailed mapping begins', so its operative form is Decision, Gate & Allocation.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Law & Governance
Origin pattern: Single lineage
Present-day reach: Specialized
Rationale: Hohfeldian jurisprudence formalized claims, liberties, powers, and immunities as distinct legal positions with correlative relations.
Related originating lineages:
- Philosophy — Analytic political philosophy generalized Hohfeld's distinctions to rights discourse and manifesto claims.
Review resolution: Hohfeldian jurisprudence is the exact primary lineage for claim, liberty, power, and immunity. Analytic political philosophy helped generalize the distinctions, while the ordered intake tree is a specialized Encyclopedia synthesis built from that single legal framework.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
The tree is deliberately an intake device, not a verdict — it decides only what kind of position a phrase names, never whether that position should be honored, resourced, or overridden. Keeping it that thin is what lets it run fast in a live workshop; the moment it starts adjudicating is the moment it stops being usable at the door.
[n1] Joel Feinberg's term manifesto rights — claims asserted as rights that name no determinate duty-bearer, functioning as aspirations rather than enforceable relations. The tree's classification step is precisely where a manifesto right can be honestly labeled a liberty or aspiration, or dishonestly demoted to hide a duty it should carry. ↩