ABSTRACT
Unlike rights in personam, which are held against a limited number of people (paradigmatically, one), rights in rem are held against everyone else in the world. Among other things, ‘everyone’ denotes a dynamic collection of persons. However, in Wesley Hohfeld’s analysis of rights, every right is a relation between exactly two people. For Hohfeld, a right in rem must therefore be analysed as an aggregate of rights, where each relation in the aggregate features the right-holder at one pole and one other person in the world at the other. Even for aficionados, this is one of the oddest aspects of Hohfeld’s account — which he crowns with a curious label to boot, ‘multital’ right — and critics have had a field day with it. For example, Penner (2020) criticises Hohfeld’s multital analysis on the grounds that its information costs are too high. In this paper, I show how Hohfeld’s treatment of rights in rem can be amended to avoid Penner’s critique.
Sreenisavan, Gopal, Rights in Rem and the Multital Ménagerie (September 30, 2024), Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, September 2024, 361–376.
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