Discovering Legal Concepts From Language

Heidegger said,“language is the home of being.” Law exists certainly throughthe form of language. To some extent, researching law is just researching language,especially the legal language. It is a long tradition to research law from the languageperspective, and there are many famous scholars, such as Bentham, Austen, Salmond,Hohfeld, Corbin and Hart. Among them, Hohfeld highly concentrated on the legallanguage.“Discovering legal concepts from language” is one of methods of the legalanalysts.This study demonstrates the legal analysts’ research method, which can be called“discovering legal concepts from language”, by centering the Hohfeld’s thought, andfollowing the history. Discovering legal concepts from language is a developingcareer. Hohfeld’s thought is deeply influenced by his predecessors, rather thanresulted from shutting himself up in a room making a cart or imagination. Likewise,his research strikingly impacts on his successors, and develops continuously, ratherthan indulges in self-admiration, or ceases to advance. Only did we put Hohfeld’stheory in the history river, not alone, to observe, we can know it rightly and deeply.Hohfeld thinks, researching legal language is not to research its nature but toresearch its practice; is not to research transcendental unchangeable legal languagebut to research empirical collective legal language. Contrasted to Bentham’sdefinition, Austen’s subscription, Salmond’s connection, Hohfeld is more exquisite tothe “right” and “truth” of the legal language, which is to make personal practice oflanguage more accord with mass idiom.Hohfeld thinks, language on the law is not common language, and it is theconcept on the law. For one word, such as “liberty”, it not only can be language on thelaw, but also can be language on common. Meanwhile, he thinks, the concept on lawonly includes the law normal concept, excluding the law fact concept. Legal conceptis a model in people’s behavior, which sets correspondent concept terminology for thenumerous behavior. He thinks, the legal concept doesn’t refer to the word “law”, butrefers to “right”,“duty”,“privilege”,“no-right”,“power”“liability”,“immunity”,“disability”. But the word “law” provides the base for the legal concept. It is from the perspective of “the legal relations” that Hohfeld analyses the eightlegal conceptions (right, duty, priviledge, no-right, power, liability, immunity,disability). He thinks that we can analyse the eight legal conceptions as a whole fromboth the “opposite relation” and the “relative relation”. When we cut the whole intotwo parts, we will find right, duty, privilege and no-right are “action legal relations”;power, liability, immunity and disability are “legal-relation legal relations”. Inaddition, when we analyse his “relative relation”, we will conclude the constraint isnot essential in the legal relation.Hohfeld’s legal concepts are inclined to become too special and enclosed. Corbinand Hart make up this shortage, by researching the legal language continuously.Corbin mainly simplifies Hohfeld’s terminology into modal words; and Hart bringsthe closed words into open structure. So it further improves that the legal analysts’,especially Hohfeld’s, method to research law is “discovering legal concepts fromlanguage”.