Examples of legal relationships include contracts,[2] marriage, and citizenship.
[6] The same was true of enslaved people under various forms of slavery, including in ancient Rome and the United States before 1865.
[7] In the civil law tradition, the concept of a legal bond (iuris vinculum) was used in the Institutes of Justinian to define an obligation as "a legal bond, with which we are bound by a necessity of performing some act according to the laws of our state.
[10] In the 19th century, the influential Pandectist legal theorist Carl von Savigny divided legal relationships into four categories: property, obligations, inheritance, and family law.
[24] In Hohfeld's framework, there are four types of legal relations (or "jural correlatives"), between: right (or claim) and duty; privilege (or liberty) and no-right; power and liability; and immunity and disability.
If someone has a "privilege", someone else has a "no-right", because they have no right (or claim) to prevent the first person from acting.
[25] Although originally intended to describe legal relations in private law, Hohfeld's framework has been extended to constitutional law, notably by the German scholar Robert Alexy.