Rights and Duties Meaning of Rights Characteristics of legal Rights Rights and Duties correlations

You lend your friend your notes for the night before the exam. She has no right to keep them, you have a right to get them back, and if she copies them at the photocopy shop down the road she is using a liberty you gave her. One small favour, and three different legal ideas are already running. Jurisprudence asks what a right actually is, who owes what to whom when a right exists, and whether every right must have a duty standing behind it. This topic gives you the vocabulary, Hohfeld's eight-part table and the usual classification of rights.

In two minutes

A legal right is an interest that the law protects by imposing a duty on someone else; Hohfeld showed that the word 'right' hides four different ideas (claim, liberty, power, immunity), each with its own correlative and its own opposite.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Jurisprudence / Legal Theory on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.