Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
After decades of efforts to expand the protections of human rights to all humanity, the opposite is increasingly taking place today: the creation of rightlessness is back in vogue. The undocumented – illegal immigrants, stateless persons, and refugees – are at the forefront of policies aimed at dispossessing and deporting large numbers of residents; others may follow later. Rightlessness demands renewed engagement with Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, ‘the right to have rights’, and its many interpretations. In this Article, I argue that ‘the right to have rights’ is fundamentally a private law right: the type of freedom and belonging that Hannah Arendt found lacking can best be secured through the right to contract and rights to property. This Article analyzes both Hannah Arendt’s claims about ‘the right to have rights’, and the legal history of the last hundred and fifty years, in order to trace a tradition of fundamental private law rights that was deeply cosmopolitan, and perhaps the closest thing to universal law. Ironically, this tradition was undermined by its own progeny, the human rights revolution. The life and death of the cosmopolitan private law tradition are examined through the cases of Max Stoeck and Friedrich Nottebohm, whom I call ‘Arendt’s doppelgängers’. Stoeck and Nottebohm, like Arendt, were German émigrés and later stateless refugees who were interned, detained, and dispossessed. Before that, however, they were also beneficiaries of this cosmopolitan legal tradition, which allowed émigrés to become successful without having any immigration status. The creation of rightlessness today is tied increasingly to documentation requirements and the blocking of private transactions, rather than directly to citizenship or statelessness.

Péter D Szigeti, Hannah Arendt’s Doppelgängers: The Creation of Rightlessness and the Right to Have (Private) Rights, American Journal of Comparative Law, volume 74, issue 3, pp 553-618 (Fall 2026). Published: 4 September 2026.