Page:Hohfeld System of Fundamental Legal Concepts.djvu/2

 the eye of that acute thinker, who, notwithstanding sharp difference of opinion, would have been liberal enough not to misinterpret them as other than testimonials of professional and personal esteem. For the rest this discussion lies under no restraint, since the contribution attempted by Professor Hohfeld is important enough to be depersonalized. Furthermore, the inheritance has, as already observed, found ‘cretio’ in ‘heredes voluntarii’ who are well able to defend it.

First of all, Professor Hohfeld’s celebrated table of jural relations must be reproduced.

Among the merits of Professor Hohfeld’s System are the following:

1. It was the first attempt at a complete systematic arrangement of jural relations. A half-dozen or more Germans had already treated in a thorough way the active (power) side of jural relations. The most complete of these attempts was that of Bierling, but no writer in any country, prior to Hohfeld, had sought to give a systematic account, with suitable terminology, of the passive side of jural relations. Partial efforts to state the correlatives (the active and passive sides of jural relations) had been made by Terry and Salmond; but the table of opposites is altogether a novelty—whether useful or not we shall have occasion to examine.

2. It made manifest, as never before, the great complexity of jural threads found in concrete legal relationships. The usual method of legal operation and of legal thinking lies in the realm of