38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 294 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1/16/2021 12:59 PM [Vol. 38:2 abstractness of the statelessness concept is turned on its head to enable States to resort to a meaningful examination of the right to nationality. It counters the rhetoric of the definition of statelessness as the convenient naming and labelling device of the State. While policy interests are part of decision making and cannot be done away with, focusing on the right to nationality takes unbridled discretion away from the State. At first blush, this approach appears counterintuitive. Since nationality is indeed the opposite of statelessness, it does not seem logical to analyze a person's enjoyment of the right to nationality to determine whether that person is stateless. Why do we need to focus on the right to nationality, as lived experience, when the issue under consideration is a condition that is the opposite of nationality? Will that not take the focus away from statelessness? I argue that it is not counterintuitive. Nationality and statelessness are jural opposites. These concepts operate on the same axis of State discretion, rights, and inclusion or exclusion from a political community. Both are related legal concepts that form opposite sides of the same coin. In legal theory, Wesley Hohfeld advanced the position that the presence of a jural concept implies the absence of its opposite. 354 Simply put, when one of the factors under consideration applies to a person, that person cannot be constrained by a disability posed by the opposite concept. If a person has the right to nationality, therefore, statelessness cannot at the same time disable them. Unlike the limited law on statelessness, international law has broadly developed to articulate what the right to nationality means. 355 Recognizing the right to nationality—that every individual is entitled to have at least one citizenship— means that its corollary of statelessness is a human rights violation that increases vulnerability to even more human rights violations. 356 Statelessness causes harm. Under political theory, scholars have argued that the condition of rightlessness within the Arendtian concept of statelessness should be recognized as causing harm, 357 including an inability to claim other fundamental rights and alienation from a political community. 358 The law has the potential to extricate people from 354. See generally Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Some Fundamental Conceptions as Applied to Judicial Reasoning, 23 YALE L.J. 16, at 32 (1913). For an application to the ICCPR, see Sarah Joseph, A Rights Analysis of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 5 J. INT'L LEGAL STUD. 57 (1999). 355. See Mirna Adjami & Julia Harrington, The Scope and Content of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 27(3) REFUGEE SURV. Q. 93, at 93–100 (chronicling the substance of the right to nationality indicated in international instruments). 356. Id. at 94. 357. Jo Shaw, Citizenship and Constitutional Law: An Introduction 6 (Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2017/21), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3075862 (last visited May 6, 2019). 358. For an exploration of the distinctive harms of statelessness, see James Draper, Climate Change and Statelessness: Informing a Response to Statelessness due to Sea Level Rise in Dialogue with Hannah Arendt (2016) (Master's Thesis, Utrecht University).