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# Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning

## Details

**Authors** Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb

**Year** 1913

**Publisher** The Yale Law Journal

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Law & Jurisprudence

**Secondary disciplines** Philosophy

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.2307/785533) 
10.2307/785533

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To clarify the legal terms used in judicial reasoning, which Hohfeld holds are confused by imprecise use of words such as right.

### How they did it (methods)

Conceptual analysis of legal relations, illustrated with judicial examples.

### What they found (results)

Hohfeld sets out eight fundamental legal conceptions in two groups of four: right, duty, privilege, no-right, and power, liability, disability, immunity. He pairs them as jural opposites (right and no-right, duty and privilege, power and disability, liability and immunity) and as jural correlatives (right and duty, privilege and no-right, power and liability, immunity and disability). A claim that another stay off one's land is a right; one's own freedom to enter is a privilege, which is the negation of a duty to stay off.

## Commentary

### In short

Each legal term is defined by what it is not (its opposite) and by the relation it bears to another party (its correlative), so a legal position is a distinction and a relation at once.

**Patterns it shows** D, R

Formal proof or model

**Added** 2026-10-09

**How to cite this** Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1913). Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. The Yale Law Journal.