Legal Rules and Legal Relations: Analysing, Improving Clarity of Thinking, and Paraphrasing

An essential skill of law students and law professionals is to analyse the meaning of legal rules. An essential skill for all university students in order to be effective readers is to employ a variety of reading strategies. I present an approach to cognitive reading strategies for law students to promote their analytical understanding of legal rules while also promoting effective paraphrasing of these rules. The American legal academic and jurist Wesley Hohfeld around 1913 came up with a framework of ‘jural relations’ in an attempt to improve precision in understanding and resolving legal issues in the USA. His framework, still receiving positive treatment from legal philosophers today, involves eight terms (right, duty, privilege, no-right, power, liability, immunity, disability) in a series of relationships (correlatives and opposites) and their application to the subjects of legal rules. For example, when someone has a right, someone else must have a corresponding duty (right and duty are ‘correlatives’). For the last three years I have used Hofheld’s framework in my courses for Law Masters (LLM) students at the University of Glasgow to aid them in analysing and writing descriptions of legal rules. In this presentation I explain the framework and show a practical context for its application together with classroom examples