DIVISIONS OF LA W. 197 Like the other divisions we have been considering, this is a division of legal rules, not of the facts to which they apply. It seems to be closely related to the practical questions which arise or may arise when a man feels agrieved and thinks of seeking redress. Persons between whom there is a dispute ; a thing which is the subject of dispute ; some form of action for resolv- ing the dispute by process of law : these are the common ele- ments of litigation between parties. This evidently does not apply to crimes, or to all private wrongs ; but the application is quite wide enough to support a classification which in truth is only a rough one. Do the persons concerned fall under any rules of law limiting or specially modifying their capacity or liability? What rights are recognized by law; with regard to the subject-matter in question? Can it be owned, or exclusively enjoyed? One of the parties, perhaps, claims by sale or bequest; could the thing be given by will ? could the sale invest him with the rights he claims to exercise? What, on the whole, is the resulting duty or liability? Then, supposing the rights of the par- ties to be settled, what are the available remedies? What is the active form, so to speak, of the legal result? Or in English legal phrase, what is the cause of action? Can compensation be recov- ered in money, or is there any other and what form of redress? The distinction between law relating to persons and law relating to things may seem to the modern reader, perhaps, not to be a real one, or not one of the first importance. For things (whatever we include in the conception of a thing,^ which we are not yet consider- ing) can plainly have no place in legal rules except in connection with the duties and rights of persons. The material world, as such, is absolutely irrelevant to jurisprudence. Every rule of law must to this extent have to do with persons. And in modern Western law we find that one person is very like another, and differences between persons tend to be reduced to a minimum. In fact we can nowa- days be tempted to regard the law of persons as identical with the law of family relations, in which the irreducible differences of persons, as we may call them, resulting from the conditions of sex and age, are of necessity most prominent. But in archaic societies it is not at all to be assumed that persons are alike. Nowadays we presume every man to have the full legal rights of a citizen in the absence of apparent reason to the contrary. If any man is not capable of buying and selling, suing and being 1 See my paper " What is a Thing ? " in the Law Quarterly Kevitw for October, 1894, X. 318.
