Ronald Coase and Wesley Hohfeld

The first time Ronald Coase uses the word “reciprocal” to describe the problem of harmful effects is in his 1959 FCC paper (Coase 1959), but this observation begs the question, what is the source of Coase’s reciprocal-harm model? Did Coase borrow or steal? Or did he discover it on his own? Today, I will one consider one possible source of Coase’s reciprocal-harm model: Wesley Hohfeld’s influential theory of legal relations. (Hohfeld 1913, 1917) Among other things, Hohfeld (pictured below) observed the ubiquity of rights talk in legal reasoning as well as the polysemy of this legal concept: the legal concept of a “right” in law can be used in different ways to describe different types of legal relations. What Hohfeld did that would shape generations of legal scholars-and perhaps at least one economist, Coase–is create a theoretical framework to capture the precise meaning of different uses of the word “right” in legal reasoning. Without getting bogged down in the tedious details of…