§ 77 Duties, Disabilities, and Liabilities
There is no generic term which is the correlative of right in the wide sense, and includes all the burdens imposed by the law, as a right includes all the benefits conferred by it. These legal burdens are of three kinds, being either Duties, Disabilities, or Liabilities. A duty is the absence of liberty; a disability is the absence of power; a liability is the presence either of liberty or of power vested in some one else as against the person liable. Examples of liabilities correlative to liberties are the liability of a trespasser to be forcibly ejected, that of a defaulting tenant to have his goods seized for rent, and that of the owner of a building to have his windows darkened or his foundations weakened by the building or excavations of his neighbours. Examples of liabilities correlative to powers are the liability of a tenant to have his lease determined by re-entry, that of a mortgagor to have the property sold by the mortgagee, that of a judgment debtor to have execution issued against him, and that of an unfaithful wife to be divorced.
The most important form of liability is that which corresponds to the various powers of action and prosecution arising from the different forms of wrongdoing. There is accordingly a narrow sense of the word liability, in which it covers this case exclusively. Liability in this sense is the correlative of a legal remedy. A synonym for it is responsibility. It is either civil or criminal according as it corresponds to a right of action or to a right of prosecution.186187