(2) A person against whom the right avails, and upon whom the correlative duty lies. He may be distinguished as the person bound, or as the subject of the duty.
(3) An act or omission which is obligatory on the person bound in favour of the person entitled. This may be termed the content of the right.
(4) Some thing to which the act or omission relates, and which may be termed the object or subject-matter of the right.
(5) A title: that is to say, certain facts or events by reason of which the right has become vested in its owner.
Thus if A. buys a piece of land from B., A. is the subject or owner of the right so acquired. The persons bound by the correlative duty are persons in general, for a right of this kind avails against all the world. The content of the right consists in non-interference with the purchaser’s exclusive use of the land. The object or subject-matter of the right is the land. And finally the title of the right is the conveyance by which it was acquired from its former owner.[[177]]
Every right, therefore, involves a threefold relation in which the owner of it stands:—
(1) It is a right against some person or persons.
(2) It is a right to some act or omission of such person or persons.
(3) It is a right over or to some thing to which that act or omission relates.
An ownerless right is an impossibility. There cannot be a right without a subject in whom it inheres, any more than there can be weight without a heavy body; for rights are merely attributes of persons, and can have no independent existence. Yet although this is so, the ownership of a right may be merely contingent or uncertain. The owner of it may be a person indeterminate. He may even be a person who is not yet born, and may therefore never come into existence. Although every right has an owner, it need not have a vested and certain owner. Thus the fee simple of land may be left by will to a person unborn at the death of the testator. To whom does it belong in the meantime? We cannot say that it belongs to no one, for the reasons already indicated. We must say that it is presently owned by the unborn person, but that his ownership is contingent on his birth.