Common Law Rights

Rights are at home in law-courts. In popular understanding, they seem like attributes attached to individuals who are found in isolation. When carefully examined, however, they can be characterised as aspects of relations in the sight of a tribunal (which may, of course, be conscience or public opinion or God). They have their being, it might be said, within a field of vision - the version of reality that the tribunal sees - in which a right apparently located in one person must have a dissimilar correlate located in another. If, when the information that counts as fact in, a court is in principle willing to do X for A against B, it cannot simultaneously have the same willingness to do X for B against A. On the account definitively worked out by Wesley Hohfeld, my claim must have its correlate in someone else’s duty, but even the simplest privilege (my right against the world to take a walk into the park) has correlates in ‘no-rights’ attaching to the indefinite range of other individuals who might take legal action with a view to stopping me.