§ 74 Legal Rights in a Wider Sense of the Term
Hitherto we have confined our attention to legal rights in the strictest and most proper sense. It is in this sense only that we have regarded them as the correlatives of legal duties, and have defined them as the interests which the law protects by imposing duties with respect to them upon other persons. We have now to notice that the term is also used in a wider and laxer sense, to include any legally recognised interest, whether it corresponds to a legal duty or not. In this generic sense a legal right may be defined as any advantage or benefit which is in any manner conferred upon a person by a rule of law. Of rights in this sense there are at least three distinct kinds, sufficiently important to call for separate classification and discussion. These are (1) Rights (in the strict sense), (2) Liberties, and (3) Powers. Having already sufficiently considered the first of these, we shall now deal briefly with the others.