  Powers raise a different issue. Many writers (e.g., Hohfeld 1919, Hart 1973) have considered them as being a type of right. By a legal power we mean the ability to bring about changes in legal rules or their application (plus some further conditions). Usually, of course, the lawmaker in granting a power also grants a right to exercise it, but occasionally this is not so, for example where the exercising of the right would itself be a crime or a civil wrong. In English Law, for example, until the position was recently changed by statute, a thief had, in certain special circumstances, the legal power to pass good title in the goods he had stolen to a third party, even though by doing so he committed a civil, and possibly also a criminal, wrong. This seems to indicate that powers should not be thought of as being rights themselves.