The Concept of Rights

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concept of rights. It is a task for legal science to systematize the legal rules, that is, to provide a description of the law which is as simple and clear as possible. The concept of rights serves this purpose. It is argued that in itself the concept of rights does not refer to anything. It does not designate any phenomenon of any kind which inserts itself between conditioning facts and conditioned consequences. The concept of rights is solely a means through which it is possible to visualize—more or less accurately—the content of a set of legal rules, namely, those rules which connect a certain disjunctive plurality of conditioning facts with a certain cumulative plurality of legal consequences. Building on this analysis of the concept of rights, the chapter provides an account of the typical rights situation, of rights as substance, and of the structure of the right. In conclusion, this analysis of the concept of rights is compared with and distinguished from the critique of the concept of rights put forward by Duguit in France and Lundstedt in Sweden.