Rights and Hohfeld’s Legal Expectations of Rights: A Summary

Abstract

Wesley N. Hofeld defined eight basic jural relations in his masterful endeavour of research on legal rights and tried to accomplish and clarify legal thinking on legal expectations of rights. The ambitious but practical description of these Jural Opposites and Jural Correlatives might be explained through the demonstration of the vertices of an ordinary cubic diagram also. His ideas have appeared as an authoritative source in the United States Supreme Court dicta, and the American Restatement of Law and have created greater opportunity for theorizing the legal theory and legal expectations. His utterances of Jural Opposites and Jural Correlatives must be a great and thrilling delight for the students of law. But, even after so much debate and discussion, the theory is followed more by verbiage critics and so it seems that legal writers are still in a state of unwarranted dilemma as to the place to be allotted to Hohfeld’s theory of rights in a rich and well scripted philosophy of a good legal system and philosophy of rights; however we would try to ferret some meritorious agenda of the theory, than short circuited horizons.