CHAPTER V 
PRIVILEGES, POWERS, AND IMMUNITIES 
B. Privilege. A legal privilege is the legal capacity (or 
ability) to do as one pleases in a certain matter, because he 
is under no legal duty to another. 
A privilege is one’s relation to another where he may conduct him- 
self as he pleases in a certain matter. Corbin. 
A privilege is one’s freedom from the right or claim of another. 
Hohfeld. 
A privilege is an immunity from liability for what but for the 
privilege would be a violation of duty. Pound. 
Illustrations of privileges are innumerable. A person has 
the privilege to go onto his own land, to make or not to make 
an offer, to accept or not to accept an offer, to cut short his 
vacation, the privilege of self-defense, the privilege against 
self-crimination, the privilege of disaffirmance of voidable 
contracts, etc. 
The correlative of a privilege is no right. No right is the 
legal liability to have another do as he pleases, or the in- 
capacity to control the conduct of another, in a certain matter. 
No right is the legal relation of a person in whose behalf society 
enforces nothing of another. Corbin. 
For example. A has no right after he has given B the 
privilege of going on his land. Strangers have no right to have 
the owner not go on his own land. 
C. Power. A legal power is the legal capacity (or ability) 
to change or create new legal capacities or liabilities for an- 
other or others. 
A power is the legal relation of one to another where one by his 
voluntary act may create new legal relations between them, or between 
the other and a third. Corbin. 
A power is one’s affirmative control over a given legal relation as 
against another. Hohfeld. 
For example. An agent has the power to bind his principal ; . 
an offeree, the power of rejection and the power of accept- 
ance; and an offerer, the power of revocation. Other powers 
are power of sale, power of appointment, power of assign- 
ment, power appendant, power in gross, power of ratification, 
power of disaffirmance, etc. 
( 37 ) 
