Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (8 August 1879, Oakland, California – 21 October 1918, Alameda, California) was an American jurist. He was the author of the seminal Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays (1919).

During his life he published only a handful of law journal articles. After his death the material forming the basis of Fundamental Legal Conceptions was derived from two articles in the Yale Law Journal (1913) and (1917) that had been partially revised with a view to publication. 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. To reflect Hohfeld's continuing importance, a chair at Yale University is named after him. The chair is unoccupied as of 2016 but was last held by Jules Coleman, who retired in 2012.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld was born in California in 1879. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1901. He went on to Harvard Law School, where he served as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated in 1904 with honors.

From 1905 to 1913 Hohfeld taught at Stanford Law School. He then moved to Yale Law School, where he taught until his death in 1918.

Jurisprudence is the branch of philosophy which deals with principles of law and the legal systems through which the law is applied. 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.

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