Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

Editorial work was undertaken to complete the revisions and the book was published with the inclusion of the manuscript notes that Hohfeld had left, plus seven other essays.

The work remains a powerful contribution to modern understanding of the nature of rights and the implications of liberty.

[7] He also continued to work as a consultant to the Morrison firm on various matters, such as the division of Claus Spreckels's estate.

[7] In 1913, the Yale Law Journal published Hohfeld's landmark article, "Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning".

According to Arthur Corbin, Yale Law School offered Hohfeld a professorship on the basis of that article.

[10] He died on October 21, 1918, in Alameda, California, of endocarditis induced by a severe infection during the 1918 flu pandemic.

[11] In 1958, Edward Hohfeld, as trustee of the May Treat Morrison Foundation, endowed a chair at Yale in his late brother's memory.

Hohfeld's contribution was to simplify; he created a very precise analysis which distinguished between fundamental legal concepts and then identified the framework of relationships between them.

His work offers a sophisticated method for deconstructing broad legal principles into their component elements.

By showing how legal relationships are connected to each other, the resulting analysis illuminates policy implications and identifies the issues which arise in practical decision making.

[14] Hohfeld noticed that even respected jurists conflate various meanings of the term right, sometimes switching senses of the word several times in a single sentence.

In order to both facilitate reasoning and clarify rulings, he attempted to disambiguate the term rights by breaking it into eight distinct concepts.

Yet whether A's relationship with B is morally suspect could only be determined by evaluating evidence on precisely what B's duty requires B to do or not to do.