Your assignment in this paper consists of its introduction and its central section, “Fundamental Jural Relations Contrasted With One Another,” in which Hohfeld distinguishes several different ideas for which the term “right” has been used. (We are skipping entirely two briefer sections at the beginning of the paper where Hohfeld makes some distinctions concerning other aspects of the law. In his introduction, Hohfeld refers to a second paper that was intended as a continuation of this one; if you are curious about it, that paper appeared in 1917 under a very similar title—“Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 26 (1917), pp. 710-770—and it, too, is available on JSTOR.)

Hohfeld begins his discussion of “jural relations” with a short account of his general view (pp. 28-30). You should begin thinking through the table he provides, but its content may become clear only as you read the discussion of examples that follows. That discussion is divided into four parts, each of which is concerned with one of the senses of “right” together with the relation that Hohfeld calls its “correlative.”

There is a natural division between the first two parts and the last two (a division that corresponds, roughly, to Hart’s distinction between primary and secondary rules). Much of the discussion in each part is a commentary on a series of examples. (Although the examples are of varying interest, there is enough substance in the commentary scattered among them that I have not attempted to direct you to only some of them. If you are not able to work your way through all of them, you should at least read the initial few pages of each of these four parts. But it’s safe, in general, to ignore the very extensive footnotes, which often take up half the page or more.)

As you read through Hohfeld’s examples, look for good illustrations of his points about the differences between and the relations among the ideas he distinguishes. But also pick a few examples that seem particularly interesting for other reasons, either because they are difficult or because they are especially telling in other respects. You should also think of some examples of your own—uses of the term “right” that you are familiar with—and ask yourself which, if any, of Hohfeld’s four senses they correspond to (but bear in mind that more than one of Hohfeld’s relations might be present in the same example).