Wesley Hohfeld a Century Later

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"Introduction Hohfeld at the Crossroads Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Ted M. Sichelman & Henry E. Smith In the century or so after the untimely death of Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, his ideas have been a source of inspiration for widely divergent streams of legal scholarship. More generally, the nature of his ideas and the circumstances of his life have placed him at the crossroads of many currents of legal and social thought, making him a (somewhat fortuitously) pivotal figure in legal theory. And after all the many explications and applications of his framework, it is as fresh and in many ways as enigmatic as on the day he left it in its unfinished state. Hohfeld wrote at a time when the natural rights paradigm was beginning to become hollowed out and increasingly - if not entirely accurately - regarded as empty formalism. Hohfeld himself was a conceptualist, and he meant his scheme of jural relations as a rational reconstruction of concepts on a more articulated basis. Building on predecessors like Ernst Bierling and John Salmond, in his landmark work, Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning"--