Why can a class not be defined as protected?

Question

Why can we not define a class as protected?

I know that we can\'t, but why? There should be some specific reason.

Answer 1

Because it makes no sense.

Protected class member (method or variable) is just like package-private (default visibility), except that it also can be accessed from subclasses.
Since there's no such concept as 'subpackage' or 'package-inheritance' in Java, declaring class protected or package-private would be the same thing.

You can declare nested and inner classes as protected or private, though.