Claim rights and liberty rights

Some philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between claim rights and liberty rights. A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder. The distinction between these two senses of "rights" originates in American jurist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's analysis thereof in his seminal work Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays.

Liberty rights and claim rights are the inverse of one another: a person has a liberty right permitting him to do something only if there is no other person who has a claim right forbidding him from doing so; and likewise, if a person has a claim right against someone else, that other person's liberty is thus limited. This is because the deontic concepts of obligation and permission are De Morgan dual; a person is permitted to do all and only the things he is not obliged to refrain from, and obliged to do all and only the things he is not permitted to refrain from.

= Menschenrechte sind unnötig und kacke

Scheiss auf Schule ich werde sowieso Obdachlos

See also

• Constitutionalism
• Constitutional economics
• Freedom versus license
• Negative and positive rights
• Rule according to higher law
• Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

External links

• The Form of Rights: The Hohfeldian Analytical System, Rights section 2.1, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Claim Rights & Liberty Rights, Human Rights section 3b, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Difference Between a Right and Liberty, Professor William E. May