Chapter X — Legal Rights
§ 70 Wrongs
We have seen that the law consists of the principles in accordance with which justice is administered by the state, and that the administration of justice consists in the use of the physical force of the state in enforcing rights and punishing the violation of them. The conception of a right is accordingly one of fundamental significance in legal theory, and the purpose of this chapter is to analyse it, and to distinguish its various applications. Before attempting to define a right, however, it is necessary to define two other terms which are closely connected with it, namely, wrong and duty.
A wrong is simply a wrong act—an act contrary to the rule of right and justice. A synonym of it is injury, in its true and primary sense of injuria (that which is contrary to jus), though by a modern perversion of meaning this term has acquired the secondary sense of harm or damage (damnum) whether rightful or wrongful, and whether inflicted by human agency or not.
Wrongs or injuries are divisible for our present purpose into two kinds, being either moral or legal. A moral or natural wrong is an act which is morally or naturally wrong, being contrary to the rule of natural justice. A legal wrong is an act which is legally wrong, being contrary to the rule of legal justice and a violation of the law. It is an act which is authoritatively determined to be wrong by a rule of law, and is therefore treated as a wrong in and for the purposes of the administration of justice by the state. It may or may not be a wrong in deed and in truth, and conversely a moral wrong may or may not be a wrong in law. Natural and legal wrongs, like natural and legal justice, form intersecting circles, this discordance between law and fact being partly intentional and partly the result of imperfect historical development.
In all ordinary cases the legal recognition of an act as a wrong involves the suppression or punishment of it by the physical force of the state, this being the essential purpose for which the judicial action of the state is ordained. We shall see later, however, that such forcible constraint is not an invariable or essential incident, and that there are other possible forms of effective legal recognition. The essence of a legal wrong consists in its recognition as wrong by the law, not in the resulting suppression or punishment of it. A legal wrong is a violation of justice according to law.