Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning

Hohfeld, W. N. (1913). Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. Yale Law Journal, 23(1), 16-59.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1913

Volume

23

Issue

1

Pages

16-59

DOI

10.2307/785533

DOI registrant

JSTOR

Link

https://www.jstor.org/stable/785533

Cited from

communication_media_studies, economics_finance, philosophy

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Information Use License
  • A rule that only forbids is a restriction; a license is recognizable because a party is positively authorized to do something with information it would otherwise have had no standing to use.

    This sourceSeparates privilege - the jural position of being free to act - from claim-right, duty, power and immunity, supplying the vocabulary in which an affirmative grant of permitted acts is distinguished from a bare prohibition.

• Latent Realizable Capacity
  • In law and institutional design it is legal powers — to make a will, to vote, to bind an organization — and dormant authority such as a vice-president's capacity to assume the presidency on succession.

    This sourceCanonical analysis of legal powers (the capacity to alter legal relations — make a will, vote, bind an organization) as standing jural positions distinct from their exercise.

• Property Rights
  • Hohfeld's analysis of jural relations clarified that each of these strands is a relation between persons with respect to a thing, not a relation between a person and the thing itself; a property right is always a claim that others have a correlative duty to respect.

    This sourceFoundational decomposition of jural relations showing that a right is a relation between persons (a claim with a correlative duty), not a relation between a person and a thing — the basis for treating a property right as an enforceable claim others have a duty to respect.

Mechanisms

• Claim–Liberty Classification Tree
  • 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."

    This sourceExplains that classifying a claim as a liberty removes any correlative affirmative duty-bearer obligation.

• Hohfeldian Relation Matrix
  • That is exactly Hohfeld's original insight — that every jural relation has a determinate correlative, so a "right" with no correlative is not yet a legal relation at all.

    This sourceSets out determinate jural correlatives, including claim-right and duty, so that a legal claim-right is defined through the corresponding duty.

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Links previously used in the corpus

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• https://doi.org/10.2307/785533 ×2

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