ABSTRACT
Rights and liberties belong to everyday political language. From the political use of the terms onemay get the idea that human history is characterized by a constant advancement of both rights and liberties that does not pose any sort of trade-off between them. In this chapter we would like to argue that such a trade-off exists and that it is related to basic equilibrium conditions that rights and liberties must satisfy.1 The rights of some individuals must often be jointly consumed with duties (i.e. an absence of liberties) of other individuals. The same rights that are enjoyed as an output or a good by some agents must be experienced as duties (as an input or as a bad) by other agents. In other words, the legal relations defining rights, duties and liberties involve the experience of opposite legal positions by agents consuming the same objects with opposite signs and may usefully be regarded as positional goods. A similar argument applies to second-order jural relations involving powers, disabilities, liabilities and immunities.
