Searching for the Rights in Human Rights: A Hohfeldian Approach for Human Rights

In this thesis I bring into conversation Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's anatomy of rights with the literature on human rights. While Hohfeld's work has been broadly accepted in the literature, what makes something a right is much more controversial. Currently the literature has been dominated by two viewpoints, the Interest Theory and the Will Theory. I argue that the Will Theory is unable to capture inalienable rights, and that because a commitment to the existence of human rights implies at least some inalienable rights, the Will Theory is an inappropriate theory of rights for the analysis of human rights.