Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (August 9, 1879, Oakland, CaliforniaOctober 21, 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 brief life he published only a handful of law review articles. After his death the material forming the basis of Fundamental Legal Conceptions was derived from two articles first published in the Yale Law Journal (1913) and (1917) that had been partially revised in anticipation of publication in longer form. 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 currently occupied by Gideon Yaffe as of 2019 and was last held by Jules Coleman, who retired in 2012.
Career
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld was born in California in 1879. He graduated first in his class from the University of California, Berkeley in 1901, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to Harvard Law School, where he served as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated in 1904.
After returning to California after graduation, Hohfeld practiced law for one year with the San Francisco law firm of Morrison, Cope & Brobeck, the distant ancestor of two large law firms: Morrison & Foerster (still in business today), and Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison (which collapsed in 2003). After Alexander Morrison died in 1921, Hohfeld's brother Edward obtained the permission of Morrison's widow, May Treat Morrison, to use the Morrison name for his new law firm: Morrison, Hohfeld, Foerster, Shuman and Clark.
Hohfeld briefly taught as an instructor at the law school then called the Hastings College of the Law. He then joined the faculty of Stanford Law School, where he became a full-time professor and taught from 1905 to 1914. He also continued to work as a consultant to the Morrison firm on various matters, such as the division of Claus Spreckels's estate.
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. Hohfeld cleverly applied his own ideas about "rights" and "privileges" to the deal he struck with Yale and Stanford: after one academic year, he would have the "right" to a permanent faculty appointment at Yale and the "privilege" of returning to Stanford, while Stanford agreed to grant him the "privilege" of leave for one year or longer, with the "right" to return to Stanford after one academic year.
When Hohfeld started teaching at Yale in 1914, many of his students (especially in third-year Trusts), signed a petition to Yale's president to send him back to Stanford. They were terrified he would flunk them for their inability to master his strange ideas. When the president told Hohfeld to take it easy on his students, Corbin had to play mediator, calm down a frustrated Hohfeld, and explain to the president the deal which Hohfeld had worked out between the two law schools. Hohfeld then exercised his right to stay at Yale, apparently because he believed Yale students would come around, like his former Stanford students who had already begun to express their gratitude for the utility of his ideas. He continued to teach at Yale until his death in 1918. He died on October 21, 1918, of endocarditis induced by a severe infection during the 1918 flu pandemic. The Yale Law Journal published a commemorative issue in his memory.
In 1958, Edward Hohfeld, as trustee of the May Treat Morrison Foundation, endowed a chair at Yale in his late brother's memory.
Hohfeld as professor of jurisprudence
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.