Forms of Right

Abstract

It has long been recognised by legal writers that different sorts of entitlement masquerade under the single term ‘right’. Early in this century, Wesley Hohfeld (1919) produced what has come to be regarded as the classic analysis of types of legal right. His analysis has not gone unchallenged either in its detail or in its general form, but it remains a highly enlightening account of how the single term ‘right’ may be used to describe quite different sorts of jural relation.¹ Hohfeld pointed out that the term ‘right’ was used to describe four distinct types of jural relation.