A Response to Kramer on Hohfeld and Quantification

This response to Matthew Kramer's article on logical quantification and Hohfeldian analysis commences with reactions to some of his preliminary observations on the Hohfeldian scheme, and on his suggested forms of the universal quantifier: “aggregative,” “distributive,” and “disjunctive.” A detailed discussion then follows of Kramer's notion of a disjunctive universal quantifier, and how he sees this as a threat to Hohfeld's insistence on one‐to‐one correlation. Kramer's position is criticized both for the incoherence of his approach to universal quantification, and for failing to appreciate the principal application of Hohfeld's scheme of analysis at the level of legal relations between two parties in a dispute before a court. Nevertheless, the issues raised by Kramer are regarded as important in confronting the neglected subject of how Hohfeld's narrow understanding of legal relations can be integrated with other concerns that may legitimately be expressed over the workings of the law, and its implications for how we should see ourselves in relation to others.