Hohenheim Theophrastus Bombastus von. See PARACELSU. Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1879–1918), American jurist who taught at Stanford and Yale. His main contribution to legal and moral theory was his identification of eight fundamental legal conceptions:
One person X has a legal duty to a second person Y to do some act A when the law requires X to do A for Y.
X has a legal privilege (or liberty) in face of Y to do A when X has no legal duty to Y not to do A.
X has a legal right (or claim) against Y that Y do A when Y has a legal duty to X to do A.
X has a legal no-right against Y that Y not do A when Y has a legal liberty in face of X to do A.
X has a legal power over Y to effect some legal consequence C for Y when there is some voluntary action of X that will bring about C for Y.
X has a legal disability in face of Y to effect C when there is no action X can perform that will bring about C for Y.
X has a legal liability in face of Y to effect C when Y has a legal power to effect C for X.
X has a legal immunity against Y from C when Y has no legal power over X to effect C. Moral philosophers have adapted Hohfeld’s terminology to express analogous moral conceptions.
In jurisprudence or ethics, these fundamental conceptions provide something like atoms into which all more complex legal or moral relationships can be analyzed. In logic, these conceptions reveal pairs of correlatives, such as a claim of X against Y and a duty of Y to X, each of which implies the other, and pairs of opposites, such as a duty of X to Y and a liberty of Y in face of X, which are contradictories. In the theory of rights, his distinctions between liberties, claims, powers, and immunities are often used to reveal ambiguities in the language of rights or to classify species of rights. See also DUTY, ETHICS, RIGHTS. C.We.