Claim rights and liberty rights

Claim rights entitle their holders to another party’s performance or restraint, while liberty rights leave holders free to act without a duty not to act.

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Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld: An American jurist whose analysis of legal relations distinguished claim-rights, liberties, powers, and immunities. His scheme supplies the precise vocabulary for distinguishing claims from liberties.
No-right (Hohfeld): The absence of a claim-right against another party concerning a particular action or outcome. A liberty correlates with another party’s no-right to demand its opposite.
Libertarianism: A political philosophy that gives priority to individual liberty and limits coercive authority. Its emphasis on noninterference foregrounds liberty-rights over claims to provision.
Freedom of religion: The freedom to hold, change, and manifest religious or nonreligious beliefs, subject to legal limits. It combines liberties of belief and practice with claims against coercion or discrimination.
Duty (law): A legally required act or omission owed by one party to another or to the public. A claim-right correlates with someone else’s duty.
Negative right: A right requiring others to refrain from specified interference or action. Its holder’s claim imposes a duty of restraint on others.
Welfare rights: Rights to social goods or services, often requiring public institutions to provide support. They are commonly framed as claims imposing positive duties, unlike bare liberties.
Right to privacy: A right protecting personal life and information from certain forms of intrusion or disclosure. Its protections can be analyzed as claims imposing duties of noninterference.
Legal power: A person’s legally recognized ability to change legal relations through an act such as contracting or waiving a right. Hohfeld distinguishes powers from both claims and liberties.
Positive right: A right requiring another party to provide an action, service, or resource. It illustrates a claim-right whose correlative is a duty to perform.