190 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. existing between Peter and his children. But these duties are not reckoned as obHgations: for they cannot be expressed as definite claims, and their performance cannot be reduced to any definite measure. They are fully discharged only when the relation out of which they arise has come to an end : in the case of marriage by death, or, in systems of law where divorce is allowed, by divorce. In the case of parental relations, the normal mode of determination is the attainment of full age by the child (which, however, often has not that effect in archaic systems, and had not in the classical Roman law) ; to which many systems add marriage in the case of daughters, and adoption. Relations of this kind, moreover, are intimately associated with moral duties which are not capable of legal definition and perhaps not of precise definition at all. Lying thus on the borderland of morality and law, they give rise in law to duties and rights which resemble obligations in being personal, but differ from obligations, and resemble duties and rights in rem, in not being capable of exhaustion by definite assignable acts, or by any number of such acts. The 'resulting duties are determinate as to persons, but not determinate as to contents. Duties which are impersonal or in rem answer, as we have seen, partly to particular and acquired rights of other persons, such as owners, partly to the so-called primitive rights which are universal. They may be duties to all one's fellow-subjects or only to some of them. Impersonal duties and rights are always attached by rules of law to some condition or state of facts. Whether the conditions are to any extent under the control of the parties or not, the legal consequences are what the law declares them to be. By the mere fact of being a citizen or subject one is entitled to a cer- tain measure of personal security, freedom to follow one's law- ful calling, and so forth. By the fact of becoming an owner one acquires the rights and faculties of an owner, such as the law de- clares them to be. One may choose to avail oneself of them or not, but one cannot alter them. If one could, one would be able to impose new duties on one's fellow-citizens without their consent, in fact, to make new law for one's own benefit. But this would con- tradict the fundamental purpose of law and justice. It is exactly what they aim at preventing. Personal duties and rights, on the other hand, may not only arise from acts of the parties, but be directly created and deter-
