Nottingham Ideas and Ideologies Seminar: January 28

My first presentation for 2026 will be on January 28 at the University of Nottingham Ideas and Ideologies Seminar.  The seminar, as I understand it, will be online through Microsoft Teams.  My understanding is that online participants need to register to access the link.  The time is 5-6:30 UK time (for Californians:  This will be a 9AM morning talk).  Also, I changed the title of the paper: 'Legal Correlativities.'

I'll be presenting what I hope will be, in some form, a chapter or part of a chapter.  It basically explores the proto-Hohfeldian elements of Grotius's jurisprudence of rights:  Grotius was the first Hohfeld and essentially anticipated the Hohfeldian system by three centuries, especially with respect to legal correlativities and jural relations.  The most innovative feature, in my view, concerns the higher-order rights (Hohfeld calls these 'powers' and 'immunities').  Grotius often uses the phrasing 'jus dat' (= 'giving a right' to another party), especially in his well known example of self-enslavement:  Does a person have the right to give away all their rights and enslave themselves to another?

But what I think he's really talking about is the Hohfeldian power, or at least that is what I'm arguing.  This raises a puzzle: Why does he so often speak of a legal right as if it were a piece of property, something that can be 'alienated' away?  I think it's a heuristic that Grotius found convenient.  But later theorists took it too literally, leading Rousseau specifically to deny alienation of rights.  Rights are inalienable. 

Viewing Grotius as a proto-Hohfeld can clarify and correct a lot of what I felt were untenable accounts of Grotius's theory of rights in the modern literature, and more generally, the place of rights in modern liberal politics.

Thanks to Blake, Ben, Charlie and the whole Nottingham team for having me in their series.