Abstract
By duty scholars, judges and legislators usually mean the position of a natural or legal person obliged towards one or more others having a right whose content is the same claim. According to the classical definitions of WH Hohfeld, if there is agreement about four different uses of the term ‘right’, the term ‘duty’ can be described either as the ‘jural opposite’ of ‘privilege’ or as the ‘correlative’ of ‘right’ in its widest and most general meaning. In the first sense a privilege is a mere derogation to a general duty, while in the second a right or a freedom necessarily implies the contrary absolute obligation not to interfere with it or not to create hurdles to its exercise. One of his European commentators, Manfred Moriz, proposes to change the opposition right-duty into a renamed couple claim-opposition. He also reminds that according to Austin there is no necessary correlation, using Hohfeld’s terminology, between duties and rights because absolute duties have no counterpart, while on the contrary all rights have corresponding duties. Moriz also complains that all the examples cited by Hohfeld belong to private law …
Ferrari, Giuseppe Franco, Duties (2015). Comparative Law Review, Vol 5, n 1/2015; Bocconi Legal Studies Research Paper No 3123820.
First posted 2018-03-02 06:44:15
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