The Law To Know

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19th and 20th centuries

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

1879–1918 · United States · Jurist and professor

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Read this first. These are short summaries of large lives and bodies of work, chosen to give a first map of legal thought, not a ranking. Dates are the standard ones, with 'c.' or 'active' where they are uncertain. We paraphrase and never quote, and each summary simplifies. Read the original works before you cite anyone. This is general information, not legal advice.

1800 BCAD 2000

Life and ideas

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld taught at Stanford and Yale and died in 1918 at the age of thirty-nine, so his body of work is small. He is remembered for two articles, in 1913 and 1917, both called Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. He observed that lawyers and judges used the word 'right' for at least four different things and so reasoned badly. He separated the claim-right (which has a duty as its correlative), the privilege or liberty (which has a no-right), the power (which has a liability) and the immunity (which has a disability), and set out their opposites. His scheme, still taught in law schools and used in the philosophy of rights, helps to analyse any legal relation precisely.

The big idea

The word 'right' hides four different relations: claim-right, privilege, power and immunity, each with a correlative (duty, no-right, liability, disability). Sorting them out makes legal reasoning clearer.

Main work

Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning (1913, 1917)

Legacy

The standard vocabulary for analysing legal rights.

The school of thought

  • Legal Positivism: Law is what the proper authorities have laid down, whatever its moral merit.
  • American Legal Realism: Law is what courts actually do; judges are people, and their reasons are not only the rules.
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