Right is, in the first place, the immediate existence which freedom gives itself in an immediate way,
a) possession, which is property; the freedom here is that of the abstract will as such, or, equivalently, of a single person relating only to itself.
b) The person, distinguishing itself from itself, relates to another person, and indeed the two have existence for one another only as owners. Their identity, which is implicit, attains existence through the passing of the property of the one into that of the other, with a common will and the preservation of their right – in contract.
c) The will, as under (a) in its relation to itself – not distinguished from another person as under (b), but distinguished within itself – is, as particular will, different from and opposed to itself as it is in and for itself, wrong and crime.

The division of right into the law of persons and of things and the right to actions, like the many other divisions of this kind, has as its immediate purpose to bring the mass of available unorganized material into an external order. What is chiefly confused in this division is the indiscriminate mixing together of rights which presuppose substantial relations, such as the family and the state, with those which relate only to bare abstract personality. To this confusion belongs the Kantian division, which has otherwise become popular, into rights to things, personal rights, and rights that are personal in a real way. It would lead too far to develop here the incoherence and lack of concept in the division into the law of persons and the law of things which underlies Roman law (the right to actions concerns legal procedure and does not belong to this order). It is enough to make clear here that only personality confers a right to things, and that personal right is therefore essentially a right of things – thing being taken in the general sense of whatever is external to freedom as such, to which my body and my life also belong. This right of things is the right of personality as such. As for what Roman law calls personal right, the human being was there considered a person only once regarded as having a certain status (Heineccius, Elementa Juris civilis, 1728, § 75); in Roman law, personality itself, as opposed to slavery, was thus merely a rank, a condition. The content of what Roman law calls personal right then concerns, besides the right to slaves – to which children too more or less belonged – and the condition of being without rights (capitis diminutio), the family relationships. In Kant, the family relationships are, moreover, treated entirely as rights that are personal in a real way. – Roman personal right is therefore not the right of the person as such, but at most of the particular person; it will later be shown that the family relationship has rather the surrender of personality as its substantial basis. It cannot but appear perverse, then, to treat the right of the particularly determined person before the universal right of personality. – Personal rights in Kant are the rights that arise from a contract, whereby I give or perform something – the ius ad rem of Roman law, which arises from an obligatio. It is true that only one person is bound to perform under a contract, just as only one person acquires the right to such a performance; but such a right cannot for that reason be called a personal right. Every kind of right belongs only to a person, and objectively a right arising from a contract is not a right to a person, but only to something external to that person or to something that person is to alienate – always to a thing.