Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's account of legal rights is now 100 years old. It has been much discussed, and remains very influential with philosophers and lawyers alike. Yet it is still sometimes misunderstood in crucial respects. This article offers a rigorous exposition of Hohfeld's framework; discusses its claims to comprehensiveness and fundamentality, reviewing recent work on the topic; and highlights the argumentative uses of Hohfeld's most important distinction.

Both moral and legal theory feature prominent talk about rights. Yet there is very little agreement about what rights are, about why we use rights in our moral or legal theories, or about what to do when there is a conflict between rights. This article surveys many of the popular theory for analysing rights and explaining their scope.

Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand entitlements in the sense that they will actively object to a second party attempting to interfere in something that a third party is entitled to do — what we call counter-protest. In two studies, we found that 3-year-old children understand when a person is entitled (...) to do something, and so they actively defend this person’s entitlement against unjustified interference from second parties. In some cases, they even enforce second-order entitlements, for example, in the case of ownership where an owner is entitled to entitle others to use the owner’s property. (shrink)