When people talk about enforcing their legal rights, they are usually talking about doing so through the courts. Can they bring an action on their own behalf, they want to know, or must they rely on the state to do it for them? If they may take action on their own, what kind of remedies can the courts award them? Can they get damages? An injunction? Declaratory relief? Or can they obtain some combination of all three? What kind of damages can they get? How large an award should they expect? How much will it all cost? How long will it take? Because we have come to rely so heavily on litigation as a means of enforcement, these questions have naturally attracted a great deal of our attention. Indeed, it often seems difficult to imagine enforcing rights in any other way.

The fact that both civil and criminal litigation play such a prominent role in the enforcement scheme in our own society, however, does not mean that litigation is the only means by which legal rights can be enforced. For many violations of legal rights, punishment may be imposed and compensation extracted by other means as well, and these other means may take many forms. If we are to understand the meaning and measure of enforceability, our first task is to decide how to categorize all the means of enforcement available. We could, for example, focus on the nature of the process used when a particular means is employed.