%0 Journal Article
%T Van der Vyver¡¯s analysis of rights: a case study drawn from thirteenth-century canon law
%A Charles J. Reid
%A Jr.
%J Koers : Bulletin for Christian Scholarship
%D 1999
%I AOSIS OpenJournals
%R 10.4102/koers.v64i2&3.502
%X In an important article published in 1988, Johan Van der Vyver challenged the prevailing reliance on Wesley Hohfeld¡¯s taxonomy of rights. Hohfeld's division of rights into claims, powers, privileges and immunities, Van der Vyver stresses, is excessively concerned with "inter-individual legal relations¡± at the expense of the right-holder's relationship to the object of the right. Van der Vyver proposes instead that an assertion of right involves three distinct juridic aspects:   legal capacity, which is "the competence to occupy the offices of legal subject;   legal claim, which "comprises claims of a legal subject as against other persons to a legal object";   legal entitlement, which specifies the boundaries of the right-holder's ability to use, enjoy, consume, destroy or alienate the right in question. This article applies Van der Vyver¡¯s taxonomy to the operations of thirteenthcentury canon law, and demonstrates that Van der Vyver¡¯s analysis provides greater depth than Hohfeld's, in that it considers both the relationship of the person claiming a particular right and the object of that right.
%U http://www.koersjournal.org.za/index.php/koers/article/view/502