Law & Economics
Portrait of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld circa 1916
Scholar portraitSource: Wikimedia Commons

Hohfeld

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

Jurist and theorist of fundamental legal relations

analytical jurisprudencelegal relationsrights analysis

Official Source Note

The Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law identifies Hohfeld as Southmayd Professor of Law from 1914 to 1918 and notes that he came to Yale from Stanford in 1914. The same archive describes his two-part Yale Law Journal article on fundamental legal conceptions as his most lasting contribution to legal scholarship.

The Yale archive summarizes Hohfeld's framework as an analysis of rights and duties through claims, privileges, powers, and immunities, together with corresponding duties, no-rights, liabilities, and disabilities. This site treats that framework as a method for reading legal materials before turning to incentive, governance, or empirical questions.

Source: Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law

Relevance to the Archive

For law-and-economics research, Hohfeld's framework helps translate broad doctrinal language into analyzable legal positions: who has a claim, who bears a duty, who can change legal relations, and who is protected against another actor's power.

Representative Contributions

  • Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning (1913)
  • Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning (1917)
  • Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays (1919)

Works Included Here