Votes as Powers

Abstract

Carl Wellman’s contribution to our understanding of rights is four-fold. First, he insisted on the analytic importance of Wesley N. Hohfeld’s taxonomy of legal advantages (Wellman 1985, pp. 7–60; Hohfeld 1919). Second, he showed how there could be moral equivalents of Hohfeld’s legal positions, thus opening the way to a detailed philosophical analysis of moral as well as legal rights (Wellman 1985, pp. 121–184). Third, he developed a useful ‘atomic’ model in which each right was conceived to consist of a core Hohfeldian position associated with other Hohfeldian elements in a way that secured the right-bearer’s dominion over the core.^l And fourth, he argued that although there are important connections between rights and dominion and between rights, choice, and agency, it does not follow that the Hohfeldian element at the core of every right is a liberty or privilege.² The core position may be a power, a claim, even a liability,³ and the core’s full significance for liberty may not reveal itself until one considers how all the complex elements of the right operate together.