zu bilden, und wir wollen es nicht bedauern, dass Shakespeare dies hier getan oder richtiger die alte Fabel beibehalten hat. Aber wenn der Jurist dieselbe einer Kritik unterziehen will, so kann er nicht anders sagen, als der Schein war an sich nichtig, da er etwas Unsittliches enthielt; ließ der weise Daniel [Portia] ihn aber einmal gelten, so war es ein elender Winkelzug, ein kläglicher Rabulistenkniff, dem Manne, dem er einmal das Recht zugesprochen hatte, vom lebenden Körper ein Pfund Fleisch auszuschneiden, das damit notwendig verbundene Vergießen des Bluts zu versagen. Man möchte fast glauben, als ob die Geschichte von Shylock schon im ältesten Rom gespielt habe; denn die Verfasser der zwölf Tafeln hielten es für nötig, in bezug auf das ‹Zerfleischen des Schuldners› (in partes secare) ausdrücklich zu bemerken, dass es auf etwas mehr oder weniger dabei nicht ankomme. (Si plus minusve secuerint, sine fraude, esto!)» (S. 64 f.). – Sehr aufschlussreiche Konsequenzen aus der elenden Gerichtsfarce sowie dem erbärmlichen Benehmen der «christlichen» Gegenspieler Shylocks hat David Henry Wilson in seinem Theaterstück Shylock’s Revenge dramatisch verarbeitet. Abgedruckt ist Wilsons Theaterstück in: Schwanitz, D., Shylock. Von Shakespeare bis zum Nürnberger Prozess, mit einem Abdruck von «Shylock’s Revenge» by D. H. Wilson. – Hamburg: Krämer, 1989.
29 Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1, S. 238 f.
30 Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1, S. 239.
31 Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1, S. 240 ff.
32 ZGB, 3. Aufl., 2011, S. 17.
33 ZGB, 25. Auflage, 1989, S. 3.
URPHÄNOMENE DER RECHTSSPHÄRE II
Korrelative Rechtsrelationen und fundamentale Menschenrechte
Abstract
1. In the first essay on fundamental phenomena inherent to the Realm of Rights and Justice, I started the investigation by looking at the manifold consequences following from a promise a person A clearly expressed to an addressee B who consciously took it in, and understood what it meant. It is a basic example of a relative legal structure. A has bound himself by what he offered to do and can only bring the undergone relation to an end if he fulfils the promise. The addressee B, on the other hand, is entitled to claim A to meet what he promised, but he is also privileged to renounce his claim – if he chooses –, exerting a typical negative absolute right which dissolves the relation between him and A.
At the end of the article, I raised two questions on which I have – to a certain extent – dealt with in the present second essay on fundamental legal phenomena:
(i) Can we conceive absolute rights having a positive social character?
(ii) Can we establish absolute legal structures, essential for an individual person, which are completely independent of the various, mutually differing legal communities?
2. In contrast e.g. to a mathematician who investigates the objective implications and laws which follow from postulates and axioms, and also in contrast to a natural scientist who analyses the processes of anorganic and organic appearances in the sense perceptive world – a researcher devoted to the study of the Realm of Rights and Justice finds himself confronted with events, facts, dilemmas, processes, riddles that only come into being, i.e. appear, develop, and manifest themselves, when at least two human individuals enter in contact with each other. Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld (1879–1918) tried to peel off typical legal patterns that emerge when two human beings establish a relationship with one another and agree to mutually accept certain rules to be applied in their relation.
Hohfeld found four pairs of Jural Correlatives:
| (a) claim (right sensu stricto) | vs. | duty; |
| (b) privilege (liberty to) | vs. | no-right (no-claim); |
| (c) power | vs. | liability; |
| (d) immunity (exemption from) | vs. | disability. – |
Looking above all at the positive four poles of the jural correlatives, we can summarise:
The (a) is certainly the basic, most important pattern, the one Adolf Reinach had centred his analysis on. If A promises B to bring him tomorrow the book, he had borrowed from him, B has received a claim-right, whereas A is bound by a duty.
A simple example for (b): A has the privilege to freely use his own smart-phone, whereas B doesn’t have any right to use A’s phone without the latter’s consent. A’s privilege means that he has the liberty to do something: to use his own phone, to enter his home, to ride his bicycle – but B has no right to do the very same things with A’s belongings – without A’s permission.
Following Hohfeld, we have to distinguish between claims (rights proper) and liberties (based on privileges) enabling us to do or to refrain from doing something. – (Powers and immunities refer to second order claims and privileges.)
Although the four pairs of Jural Correlatives belong to the vast group of relative legal structures, the liberty to do or to refrain from doing something unveils an individual privilege and faculty that surpasses the ordinary level of relative legal relationships, and points to an absolute right (in the sense of liberty) enabling oneself to act in an independent way.
3. As soon as a child negates to do – or rather to stop doing something his mother has demanded, we perceive how the sense of being an individual with his own sovereign will has awakened the child’s self-consciousness. This is merely a first step. «As soon as a child invokes the principles of equality, consistency, and adherence to a promise or a rule – to argue, for example, that he has a right to a certain toy because his brother had it earlier and because they always take turns with it and because it is his and because his father said so – then it makes sense to speak of an appeal to Right or to Law.» (H. J. Berman7) These observations underline the crucial significance the awakened ability and the courage to negate obedience to authority enables and triggers the young individual to develop his self-confidence and confirm himself as an independent, potentially free personality.
4. Parallel to the ripening personal confidence, the young adult normally becomes aware of other individuals bearing and unfolding individual, personalised traits of many characters common to virtually all human individuals. And he perceives, how these other individuals assert, maintain, partly modify – and as a whole stand to their personalised qualities and traits. If this process leads me, as well as my fellow beings to recognise in each other a mutually equivalent personal dignity, albeit as individuals largely differing regarding the external appearances, the main interests, the abilities, the innermost convictions, and the like – then we are prepared to get acquainted with the elementary and fundamental individual rights and liberties, to discuss them, and – eventually, and hopefully – to adhere and defend them in our own, independent, personal way.
5. Carlos Santiago Nino (3.11.1943–29.8.1993) proposed three fundamental individual rights, and he added a fourth one, the hedonistic right. What Nino concentrated on, are rights to do or to abstain from doing certain things: «to profess or not to profess a religion,