property

Dictionary: prop·er·ty   (prŏp'ər-tē)

1. 1. Something owned; a possession.
   2. A piece of real estate: has a swimming pool on the property.
   3. Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.
   4. Possessions considered as a group.
2. The right of ownership; title.
3. An article, except costumes and scenery, that appears on the stage or on screen during a dramatic performance.
4. 1. A characteristic trait or peculiarity, especially one serving to define or describe its possessor.
   2. A characteristic attribute possessed by all members of a class. See synonyms at quality.
5. A special capability or power; a virtue: the chemical properties of a metal.

[Middle English, from Old French propriete, from Latin proprietās, ownership (translation of Greek idiotēs), from proprius, one's own.]

1. Anything over which a person or business has legal title. Property may be tangible or intangible, but it is owned by an entity and is therefore considered an asset or a liability attributable to that entity.

2. An employee who is under contract because he or she has something - skills, talents, etc. - of such value that a business may not be able to function without his or her services.

3. Another way of saying real property, real estate or land.

Investopedia Says:
1. Some examples of tangible property that may be included as assets of a business are furniture, fixtures and equipment. Intangible property includes copywritten material, ideas, patents, rights and so on.

2. Because of their importance to the companies for which they work, some employees are under contract and actually considered to be the property of a business for a period of time. For example, celebrities and professional athletes are often termed the "exclusive property" of the production companies, sports franchises or other corporations that have them under contract (for example, a basketball star who endorses footwear for a company like Nike or Reebok may be that company's "exclusive property").

3. Land and buildings are examples of real property.

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1. Every valuable right or interest that is subject to ownership, has an exchangeable value, or adds to one's wealth or estate. Property describes one's exclusive right to possess, use, and dispose of a thing, as well as the object, benefit, or prerogative that constitutes the subject matter of that right.

2. Real estate.

1. The rights that one individual has in lands or goods to the exclusion of all others; rights gained from the ownership of wealth. See Real Property, Personalty, Possession, Title.
Example: An individual may own property with the associated rights to enjoyment, control over others' use of the property, and disposition, subject to government-imposed Restrictions. Groups of individuals may own property, with ownership rights shared collectively. Governments may also own property, held for public use.

2. Real estate.
Example: The appraiser needed to inspect the property prior to establishing its value.

noun

1. One's portable property: belonging (often used in plural), effect (used in plural), good (used in plural), lares and penates, personal effects, personal property, possession (used in plural), thing (often used in plural). Informal stuff. Law chattel, movable (often used in plural). See owned/unowned.
2. Something, as land and assets, legally possessed: estate, holding (often used in plural), possession (used in plural). See law, owned/unowned.
3. Usually extensive real estate: acre (often used in plural), estate, land. See owned/unowned.
4. A distinctive element: attribute, character, characteristic, feature, mark, peculiarity, quality, savor, trait. See be.

Rightful ownership; the exclusive right to a thing.

1. A legal relation between a person and a ‘thing’;

2. the object of a legal relation with a person. The person may be a natural person or an artificial person. Property may be private, common, or public. The ‘thing’ may be quite concrete, for example, a computer, or abstract, for example the copyright in a computer's software. It may also be animate, when property in animals or in other persons is accepted. The legal relation of private property is often contrasted with that of contract, because the person who has private property usually has claims or rights against all other persons, whereas a contractor acquires rights only against other contractors. For example, since the computer I am using is my own, I have the right to exclude all other persons from using it, but I have special rights against its supplier as a result of the contract of sale when I bought it.

An important element in the political theory of property is the justification of any favoured property system, be it private, common, or public. This requires examination of the sorts of titles to ‘things’ which are legitimate, an investigation of the ways in which titles may be acquired, transferred, and extinguished. In particular, the explanation of the legitimate transfer of private property (for example, through sale or gift) does nothing to explain how anyone became entitled to property in the first place. In some theories (like Locke's and Nozick's) this question is investigated by placing individuals in a state of nature where property is absent, except the property persons are taken to have in themselves (see self-ownership). In others it is explored by trying to see the consequences for property systems of promoting particular values, like utility or freedom.

Property is a centrally important institution because it is the consequence of, and has implications for, the economic, legal, and political systems of a society. This is true both of the sorts of property a society recognizes, and of the distribution of that property. Property is therefore at the heart of discussions about power and justice. In the first case, there are questions about the connection between power and resources. In the second, there are problems not only of intragenerational justice but also of intergenerational and international justice to be addressed. Once the question ‘Why should anyone have any sort of property?’ is asked, the particular location of individuals in time and within particular legal jurisdictions may look arbitrary. This is especially important for natural rights theories, since the rights any individual can enjoy should, on that basis, be universal. Because of the dynamics of property systems, it has proved very difficult to design property institutions which genuinely embody natural rights. This is true of both individualistic private property theories and radical, communal property theories. Natural rights theories tend to see all rights as property rights, whereas alternative accounts try to specify the particular features of property. Many writers see property as the result of positive legal systems, arguing that in the absence of the law's coercion ‘property’ could not exist. Because positive law is a human artifice this approach recognizes that the institution is a consequence of decision which is in need of justification.

— Andrew Reeve

For more information on property, visit Britannica.com.

1. Any asset, real or personal.
2. An ownership interest.

In social life, to have something as property is to have the right to use it. Use may here include exclusion of other people, consumption, transfer, loan, alteration, destruction, etc., so it can come in various degrees. There is no reason for all such uses to be protected by law as one indivisible whole (for instance, a property right in land need not include the right to exclude the public or destroy the land; ownership of a building may not even include the right to alter it at will; my right to use my arm may not go with a right to sell it to someone else). The foundation of individual property rights is a principal topic of political theory. Suggestions include that of Locke, that we have a natural right in that with which we have ‘mixed our labour’; the consequentialist argument that without such rights things would be worse all round; and the Hegelian view that only in a framework of property rights is individual freedom possible. Again, there are differences depending upon what kind of property is in question: private possession of the means of production of goods may be treated quite differently from private rights to consumption of goods (see Proudhon). The abolition of private property is one of the aims of the Communist Manifesto (see Marx).

Property lies at the center of Americans' minds and hearts. When they look around they see land, all of which is owned by someone. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured that reality when he wrote in 1841, "I cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Mountains or the Allegheny, but some man or corporation steps up to tell me it is his." While Emerson and other reformers questioned the system of property, the vast majority of Americans have embraced it. The American legal system is central to protecting individuals' rights to property, including the right to exclude trespassers; the right to have property free from excessive government regulation (which is also the right to use property in the manner the owner wishes); and the right to sell (alienate) property.

Restrictions on Property Rights

Property exists in conjunction (and often in conflict) with community rights. The federal and state governments, for example, have the right of Eminent Domain, which is the power to purchase property from owners for public use, even if they do not want to sell. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution require that the government pay "just compensation." The eminent domain power is used frequently to acquire property for highways, railroads, public parks, and urban renewal. Some of the most contentious property disputes in the late twentieth century have been over the appropriateness of eminent domain for urban renewal projects, such as the wholesale purchase of Poletown, a Polish community in Detroit, which was subsequently sold to General Motors in the early 1980s. Many questioned whether the property was being taken for public use. That case placed individual homeowners and their close-knit community against the larger community and General Motors. Other urban renewal projects have also been controversial because of their dislocation of communities. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court remains reluctant to intervene in a legislature's judgments about what constitutes public use.

Eminent domain is one example of the way that private property is subject to community rights. Zoning is another illustration. During the Progressive Era, local governments frequently imposed restrictions on the use that could be made of land, such as prohibiting the location of houses in industrial areas, limiting the size and height of buildings, and requiring minimum lot sizes for houses. Those restrictions on the use of property often had the effect of dramatically decreasing property value. The Supreme Court upheld zoning in 1926 in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company. The decision, issued by Justice George Sutherland—one of the most consistently conservative jurists of the twentieth century—rested on the principle of the police power, which is the state's power to regulate for the health, safety, and morality of the community. Since that case, courts have consistently given wide latitude to government decisions about zoning.

Euclid drew upon a long history of limitations on use of property for noxious purposes under the police power. It referred to a 1915, Hadacheck v. Sebastian, case that allowed Los Angeles to regulate a brick-making plant that was located near residences. As early as the colonial era, governments heavily regulated the use of property, such as by ordering the draining of swamps and by limiting the use of property for taverns, tanneries, and the storage of gunpowder. In the nineteenth century, many judges allowed significant regulation of property, as by imposing restrictions on building in a manner that might be dangerous, on using property for immoral purposes, and on locating businesses in residential areas. In some cases, the government ordered the destruction of property that was posing an immediate threat, such as blighted trees. Frequently, homes and businesses were burned during fires to create a firebreak and thereby stop the fire from spreading. In those cases, the government paid no compensation. Courts also restricted the rights of cemetery owners to exclude visitors. Despite sweeping statements, such as William Blackstone's that property consists of "that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe," property was frequently subject to regulation in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Compensation and Regulatory Takings

Some of the most important regulations of property related to property in human beings, known as slaves. Slaves who committed crimes were often punished without compensation to owners. Masters were also restricted in some of the "uses" they could make of slaves; they could not, for example, teach slaves to read, and harsh punishments were usually prohibited. In the aftermath of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in Virginia, the legislature discussed the abolition of slavery. One person likened slaves to dangerous property and urged that they be freed, without paying any compensation to their owners, on the theory that dangerous property could be destroyed without compensation. Later on, in environmental cases, federal and state statutes greatly restricted dumping hazardous waste on property and imposed even retroactive liability on the owners of contaminated property. When the Thirteenth Amendment confirmed the end of slavery, it also marked the wholesale termination of property rights.

On occasion, when there is significant limitation on the use of property, courts require the government to pay compensation. Those cases are called "regulatory takings," because the government's regulation has, in effect, taken the property owner's rights. Determining when a regulation becomes a taking is difficult and generated substantial debate in the twentieth century. The modern era of regulatory takings jurisprudence began with the Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon decision of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1922. Justice Holmes struck down a state statute prohibiting coal companies from mining under houses in a way that caused the surface of the land to cave in. Holmes thought the regulation went "too far"; it deprived the coal mine owners of their right to property, he stated, for they had already purchased the surface rights. Justice Louis Brandeis's vigorous dissent argued that the state has the right to prohibit dangerous uses of property, such as prohibiting the sale of alcohol and margarine (which was then considered unhealthy).

Since the mid-1980s, the Supreme Court has revisited regulatory takings claims numerous times, in two contexts. First, landowners were asked to give up interests in their property in exchange for permission to build on it. The Supreme Court concluded that in those cases, known as exactions, the government must show a reasonable nexus between the burden imposed and the use being permitted and that the burden imposed by the state is reasonable in light of the proposed development. Thus, it is permissible to condition expansion of a parking lot, which will increase water run-off, on the grant of the right to expand a nearby floodplain onto property held by the owner of the parking lot. In a second series of cases, landowners argued that their property was taken when restrictions on building essentially prohibited all development of the land. The Supreme Court looks to a variety of factors to determine whether a regulation restricting development is permissible, including the economic effect of the regulation and whether it unreasonably interferes with owners' expected profits from their investments.

Balancing Interests

Property law balances competing interests between neighboring owners as well as between property owners and the community. The doctrine of "nuisance," for instance, limits owners from using their property in a way that unreasonably interferes with neighbors. So, a person living in a city may be prohibited from operating a feed lot on her property. At other times, when a use of property is particularly important, but it significantly harms a neighbor, nuisance law may award damages to the neighbor. Thus, a cement plant that provides significant employment, and would cost millions to relocate, may continue to operate, but it will have to pay for the interference it causes to the lives and property of neighbors. Frequently, owners also have rights in their neighbors' property, such as an easement to cross a neighbor's property. Covenants, or agreements, between neighbors also give them rights in the other's property, such as the right to prohibit the construction of a carport, or the right to veto architectural changes.

One covenant that was common among property owners in the years between 1900 and 1948 was the racially restrictive covenant. It took several forms: one prohibited an owner from selling property to members of certain races or religions; another allowed the sale, but prohibited members of certain races or religions from occupying the property. The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer declared the enforcement of those covenants unconstitutional because they violated the equal rights of members of the prohibited classes. After the case, the covenants were unenforceable, although some property owners and courts made feeble attempts to get around the decision until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed them completely.

Twentieth-Century Legislative Innovations

Federal legislation in the New Deal and civil rights eras imposed additional limitations on property rights. Thus, union organizers have the right to appear on private property for limited organizing efforts under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 limits the right of owners to discriminate in the sale or renting of housing. Sellers, landlords, and real estate agents cannot discriminate in the terms, conditions, or availability of property based on race, gender, religion, marital status, or disability. Similarly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 limits the right of property owners who provide public accommodations to refuse service on the basis of race. Those federal acts realign the power held by property owners and the public.

From the late 1960s, property law became increasingly concerned with the welfare of tenants. In most jurisdictions, landlords must deliver and maintain habitable premises for residential tenants. If tenants fail to pay rent, the landlord can no longer forcibly remove them without a court order. When tenants move out before the lease expires, landlords must "mitigate" the harm by searching for substitute tenants.

There have been similar changes in marital property rights, which are designed to equitably divide property at divorce. A few states, for instance, consider an educational degree earned during marriage as marital property. Such a doctrine entitles the spouse who assisted in the acquisition of the degree some economic benefit from it. Another development, known as "palimony," allows those who contribute to a partner's acquisition of wealth to a share of that wealth, even if the couple was never married. Another important change since the 1960s is the movement to view many government entitlements, like welfare and pensions, as property. That view means that the government must provide recipients with due process in the award and termination of benefits.

Courts and the Protection of Property: Adverse Possession

Throughout American history, courts have been important in protecting property. They have consistently punished trespassers, although there were occasional squatter and tenant movements, such as the Anti-Rent movement in upstate New York in the 1840s, that supported the right of tenants to purchase the land they occupied on long-term leases. The courts have been perhaps most notorious in supporting the ouster of Native Americans from land. The most notorious case is Johnson v. McIntosh, decided in 1823. Chief Justice John Marshall seemed to recognize the inherent justness of the claim that the Plankasaw tribe once owned the land at issue in what is now Illinois, but he said the power of precedent constrained him. Marshall's frequently quoted opinion observed that "conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim. …"

While property law protects owners, it also respects those who use property efficiently. The doctrine of adverse possession allows squatters who occupy property for an extended period of time to acquire title to the property if they make sufficient improvements on the property or otherwise use it, such as for farming. Adverse possession indicates a pro-development bias in the law that encourages the development of land. Similarly, many states have statutes that allow those who mistakenly build on land thinking it is their own to buy the land from the true owner. Such provisions demonstrate property law's preference for exploitation of the land.

Landscape art in the nineteenth century frequently confirmed Americans' desire to possess property—and put their footprints on the land. George Inness's painting, The Lackawanna Valley, places a railroad roundhouse in the center of New York farmland. Similarly, Thomas Cole's Notch in the White Mountains (1839) depicts a mountain pass in the fall, a beautiful scene of nature, along with a tree stump, a house with smoke rising from its chimney, and a rider on a horse, going along a well-worn road.

Changing Ideas About the Purposes of Property

Property served different purposes in the founding era, the antebellum period, and the years after the Civil War. Around the time of the Revolution, it was perceived as a way of ensuring independence. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the importance of widely distributed property, for property provided the independence that made virtuous citizenship possible. Following the Revolution, states changed their laws regarding distribution of property at death so as to provide for a more equitable distribution among children and grandchildren. The changes both reflected American values favoring wide distribution of property, and helped shape an ideology proclaiming that property should be widely distributed. That civic republican vision of property has some modern adherents, who sometimes reconceptualize the community's rights over property. One argument runs that workers have an interest in the factory where they work, which courts should protect.

In the antebellum period, beginning around 1820, American values began to change. Wide distribution of property grew less important; instead, Americans spoke about the virtues of property as a way of acquiring wealth and of disciplining government. Southern proslavery writers like Thomas Roderick Dew and Nathan Beverly Tucker told their readers that throughout history, property was important in securing freedom. When English kings needed money, for instance, they traded increased rights for tax revenue. Some still appealed to the need for wide distribution of property—and the evils of concentrated wealth. Abolitionists frequently criticized wealthy slaveowners as anti-republican. Because slaveowners had a disproportionate share of property in the community, they did not have the same values or interests as the community. Their great power over others—poorer whites as well as slaves—led them to act imperiously. The Homestead Act of 1862, passed during the Civil War, granted 160 acres of land to people who agreed to settle it for five years. It reflected the desire for wide distribution of land.

During the Reconstruction Era and the Gilded Age, judges placed a premium on the freedom of contract. Born of the Civil War–era ideology that labor should be freely alienable (rather than owned by others), property was viewed as a commodity that could—and should—be sold. Those ideas became transformed into a doctrine that businesses may make contracts free from governmental scrutiny. Often those contracts held employees to low wages. Under their terms, if employees left before the contract was up, they received no compensation at all.

In the twentieth century, property has received varying degrees of protection. During the Progressive Era there were sharp conflicts within the courts and society about the value of protecting property at the expense of workers. A 1905 Supreme Court case, Lochner v. New York, struck down a minimum wage, maximum hour law for bakers on the principal of freedom of contract. Over the next two decades, however, many cases upheld similar laws. During the New Deal, the Supreme Court went so far as to approve of a statute that extended the time that debtors had to pay their mortgages before they were foreclosed.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a period in which property rights will be given increased protection from regulations seems to be starting. Those sentiments appear in Congress as well as in the U.S. Supreme Court. For instance, in 1998 Congress extended the period of time that a work may have copyright protection to seventy years after the death of the creator. Another example of the increased respect for property is the dramatic reduction in the estate tax in 2001, which was advocated even by members of the Democratic Party, the major party typically less concerned with protecting wealth.

Bibliography

Alexander, Gregory S. Propriety and Commodity: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Brophy, Alfred L. "The Intersection of Property and Slavery in Southern Legal Thought: From Missouri Compromise Through Civil War." Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2001.

Donahue, Charles, Jr., Thomas E. Kauper, and Peter W. Martin. Cases and Materials on Property: An Introduction to the Concept and the Institution. Saint Paul, Minn.: West, 1993.

Fisher, William W. "Ideology, Religion, and the Constitutional Protection of Private Property: 1760–1860." Emory Law Journal 39 (1990): 65–134.

Hart, John F. "Colonial Land Use Law and Its Significance for Modern 'Takings' Doctrine." Harvard Law Review 109 (1996): 1252–1300.

Nedelsky, Jennifer. Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Novak, William J. The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Plater, Zygmunt J. B., et al. Environmental Law and Policy: Nature, Law, and Society. Saint Paul, Minn.: West Group, 1998.

Rose, Carol M. Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994.

Siegel, Stephen. "Understanding the Nineteenth Century Contract Clause: The Role of the Property-Privilege Distinction and Takings Clause Jurisprudence." University of Southern California Law Review 60 (1986): 1–119.

Singer, Joseph William. The Edges of the Field: Lessons on the Obligations of Ownership. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

———. Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2000.

Treanor, William Michael. "The Original Understanding of the Takings Clause and the Political Process." Columbia Law Review 95 (1995): 782–887.

Williams, Joan. "The Rhetoric of Property." Iowa Law Review 83 (1999): 277–361.

In modern times, "property" generally refers to the ownership of an economic good, such as land or money. During the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, property encompassed a much wider variety of entitlements, including political powers, honorific and useful privileges, and tax exemptions. As one late-seventeenth-century dictionary defined it, property is the mastery of "the resource, the domain, the seigniory of something" (cited in Kaiser, p. 302). Such language reflects the continued influence of later feudal law, which conflated wealth and status and regulated the sale and disposition of property according to the legal standing of its owners and the nature of the property involved.

Public Seigniory Vs. Private Seigniory

Although adumbrated in medieval jurisprudence, the distinction between public power and property rights, or what the influential early-seventeenth-century French jurist Charles Loyseau termed, respectively, "public seigniory" and "private seigniory," had little practical meaning until a royal state emerged that drained away political powers previously held by noble lords, often referred to as seigniors. During the early modern period such a state did gradually emerge in western Europe. Royal legal systems eventually reduced the scope and importance of seignorial justice, while royal armies grew so large that by 1700 the armed units equipped by and loyal to the lords ceased to pose a credible military threat and were disbanded.

Yet the distinction between public and private seigniory by no means disappeared in western Europe, for noble landholders continued to exercise public functions in a variety of ways. In many areas courts run by the seigniors continued to hear cases, some of which involved contests between lords and tenants over land rights. In England noble landlords and their younger brothers translated territorial possession into political power through their heavy representation in Parliament, which after 1688 became the senior partner within the English state. In France the distinction between public and private seigniory was muddied by venal office holding, that is, the practice of selling state offices, including judgeships in the kingdom's superior courts, to private individuals. To be sure, most European peasant and middle-class property owners did not exercise direct political power, but the growth of commerce did expand their access to it, most notably through the purchase of noble landed estates by wealthy merchants. This trend so threatened noble status that kings across Europe outlawed the sale of seigniories to non-nobles, a restriction that was more effectively enforced in eastern Europe than in western Europe, where the middle class was larger and wealthier.

Usufructuary Domain Vs. Direct Domain

Although non-landed property expanded greatly during the early modern period, most wealth in early modern Europe still took the form of land and buildings. In areas where Roman law remained strong, such as southern France, land was typically held as freehold, that is, as property that did not require payment of services or dues to a lord. But in most European countries, the majority of peasants held only usufructuary domain over their land, meaning that, even where they had escaped serfdom, as in almost all of western Europe, peasants owed services and dues to a seignior, whose rights over peasant land constituted their direct domain. Beyond direct domain strictly understood, seigniors enjoyed a variety of honorific privileges, such as the right to lead ceremonial processions, and useful privileges, such as the exclusive right to hunt in local forests. In return seigniors were expected to demonstrate paternal concern for their tenants by, for example, providing tenants with occasional gifts and sponsoring village festivals.

In western Europe property ownership became progressively more associated with usufructuary domain during the early modern period, and many labor services were converted into money payments. But these changes did not mean that peasant services and dues, which varied considerably in cost and nature from region to region, were negligible. Thus, whereas in France annual labor services typically required a mere two or three days of work on lands directly farmed by the seignior, in Germany some peasants were required to work for their lords more than three hundred days per year. Labor services in western Europe were usually less onerous than dues, which ranged from rents to obligatory fees for use of the lord's oven and mill to payments on the transfer of land from one tenant to another. Tenants might also be required to pay for the drafting of detailed legal affidavits stipulating their obligations to their lords.

It is unclear whether and to what extent the burden of peasant dues in western Europe grew over the early modern period. But it does appear that western European seigniors became more adept at finding legal pretexts for squeezing more revenue from their tenants, thereby embittering lord-tenant relationships and dispelling the paternalistic aura surrounding them. In England peasants also faced the loss of their land titles as a result of enclosure, the combining of smaller plots into larger, more efficient fields by landlords, a practice that escalated after 1750. Enclosure has been vigorously defended on the grounds that it raised living standards generally by lowering bread prices and that most peasants found new ways to earn a living. At the same time, by allowing larger landlords to dispossess smaller ones, enclosure deprived peasants of the one resource that cushioned them from the vagaries of the market, and it disrupted traditional rhythms of rural life.

In eastern Europe the condition of peasants—most of them enserfed over the previous three centuries—was surely worse than in the West, as evidenced by a wave of peasant rebellions during the later eighteenth century that swept over Bohemia, Russia, and elsewhere. Although the causes of these rebellions were multiple, they generally arose in response to seignorial efforts to exact greater labor services and in some areas to state-supported seignorial efforts to turn serfs into virtual slaves. For despite mild state efforts at moderating such abuses, Russian and Polish seigniors routinely deprived serfs of their land rights, sold them as chattel to other lords, and inflicted brutal corporal punishments and even death sentences upon tenants who resisted the loss of their rights.

Women and Property

As in so many other respects, women suffered disadvantages in the matter of property ownership. Generally, the property women brought into marriages and the money they earned as wages legally fell under the control of their husbands. Wives could not normally make binding contracts or sue in court without their husbands' permission. Longstanding misogyny lay behind these limitations, but the need to preserve family unity provided their chief justification, although significant restrictions on female property ownership were not universal. Thus, widows often received and disposed of income accruing from their dead spouse's property, while unmarried women, if the sole living heir, might inherit the estate of their parents. Furthermore, some marriage contracts stipulated that wives retained ownership of their dowries. Despite laws to the contrary, certain cities permitted women to make investments on their own and conduct private businesses. Women also exerted some independence in the deeding of movable property (goods other than land or buildings) to their heirs. In short, despite major legal obstacles in the acquisition and disposition of property, women were by no means entirely dispossessed.

The Growing Debate on Property

During the eighteenth century, seignorialism became the object of a growing debate arising from new political conditions, especially the need for greater state revenues, and the birth of cultural movements, notably the Enlightenment. By 1750 it had become clear that the squeezing of peasants by the seigniors was seriously eroding the state tax base and reducing the incentive of peasants to produce. In some areas of Germany seignorial authority was already declining with the growth of a large number of masterless, landless workers. Influenced by the liberal doctrines of the Enlightenment, German reformers tried to accelerate and regulate this process by limiting seignorial dues and services in hopes that liberation from the most oppressive aspects of seignorialism and a larger stake in the produce of a seigniory would encourage peasants to work harder. A similar attack on seignorialism was launched in France by a group of influential political economists called the Physiocrats. The Physiocrats, too, advocated the gradual scaling back of seignorial dues, as well as the elimination of state-imposed restrictions on the use and disposition of property, which they portrayed as impediments to expanding output. Although they did not deny the legality of seignorial property outright, the Physiocrats undercut its legitimacy by representing seignorial rights as the product of the lords' historic violence and tyranny over the peasantry. Defenders of seignorial rights tried to turn the tables on the Physiocrats by contending that these rights were "natural" properties acquired legitimately through contracts freely entered into by tenants. This counterargument carried little weight after 1789, when the French Revolution, which proclaimed property as an "inviolable and sacred" right, radically scaled back peasant dues, transformed remaining ones into pure rents, and eliminated all the honorific privileges of the seigniors.

By the late eighteenth century, property in western Europe was gradually emerging from its seignorial cocoon, but this did not mean that it had lost all its political significance. On the contrary, as had been the case in England for a long time, property was considered an integral part of one's political personality, particularly insofar as it enabled its owners to resist corruption by "despotic" rulers. The late-seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke, in preaching the trinity of "life, liberty, and property" as natural rights of all people, helped make property holding a prerequisite for active citizenship in virtually all states until the later nineteenth century. It was only with the flood tide of democracy that property ownership became legally dissociated from political rights, a dissociation that has lasted until the present day.

Bibliography

Blum, Jerome. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe. Princeton, 1978.

——. Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, 1961.

Erickson, Amy Louise. Women and Property in Early Modern England. New York, 1993.

Kaiser, Thomas E., "Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Tradition of French Jurisprudence." In The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, edited by Dale Van Kley, pp. 300–339, 418–424. Stanford, 1994.

Markoff, John. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park, Pa., 1996.

Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.

Schlatter, Richard. Private Property: The History of An Idea. New York, 1951. Reprint, 1971.

Wright, William. Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia. Minneapolis, 1966.

—THOMAS E. KAISER

"every species of valuable right or interest that is subject to ownership, has an exchangeable value, or adds to one's wealth or estate." 107 A. 2d 274, 276. "Property" describes one's exclusive right to possess, use, and dispose of a thing, 202 P. 2d 771, as well as the object, benefit, or prerogative which constitutes the subject matter of that right. 331 U.S. 1.

common property that which belongs to the citizenry as a whole, 7 P. 2d 868; property owned by tenants in common, 108 P. 2d 377, or in some jurisdictions where designated by statute, that owned by husband and wife. 3 Cal. 83. Compare community property.

incorporeal property see incorporeal [incorporeal property].

intangible property see intangible property.

personal property see personal property [personalty].

public property see public property.

tangible property see tangible property.

(DOD) 1. Anything that may be owned. 2. As used in the military establishment, this term is usually confined to tangible property, including real estate and materiel. For special purposes and as used in certain statutes, this term may exclude such items as the public domain, certain lands, certain categories of naval vessels, and records of the Federal Government.

n.

Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference.

Quotes:

"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it." - Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing." - Calvin Coolidge

"Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own." - E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

"No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If a man owns land, the land owns him." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

See more famous quotes about Property

This article is about the legal or moral ownership rights. For other uses, see Property (disambiguation).

This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (July 2007)

Property law

Part of the common law series

Acquisition

Gift · Adverse possession · Deed Conquest · Discovery · Treasure Trove Lost, mislaid, and abandoned property Alienation · Bailment · License

Estates in land

Allodial title · Fee simple · Fee tail Life estate · Defeasible estate Future interest · Concurrent estate Leasehold estate · Condominiums

Conveyancing

Bona fide purchaser Torrens title · Strata title Estoppel by deed · Quitclaim deed Mortgage · Equitable conversion Action to quiet title · Escheat

Future use control

Restraint on alienation Rule against perpetuities Rule in Shelley's Case Doctrine of worthier title

Nonpossessory interest

Easement · Profit Covenant running with the land Equitable servitude

Related topics

Fixtures · Waste · Partition Riparian water rights Lateral and subjacent support Assignment · Nemo dat Property and conflict of laws

Other common law areas

Contract law · Tort law Wills, trusts and estates Criminal law · Evidence

v • d • e

Property is any physical or virtual entity that is owned by an individual or jointly by a group of individuals. An owner of property has the right to consume, sell, rent, mortgage, transfer and exchange his or her property.^[1][2][3] Important widely-recognized types of property include real property (land), personal property (physical possessions belonging to an individual), public property (state owned or publicly owned and available possessions) and intellectual property (ownership rights over artistic creations, inventions, etc.), although the latter is not always as widely recognized or enforced.^[4] A title, or a right of ownership, is associated with property that establishes the relation between the goods/services and other individuals or groups, assuring the owner the right to dispense with the property in a manner he or she sees fit. Some philosophers assert that property rights arise from social convention. Others find origins for them in morality or natural law (e.g. Saint Irenaeus).

Contents 1 Use of the term 2 General characteristics 3 Theories of property 4 Property in philosophy 4.1 Ancient philosophy 4.2 Pre-industrial English philosophy 4.2.1 Thomas Hobbes (1600s) 4.2.2 James Harrington (1600s) 4.2.3 Robert Filmer (1600s) 4.2.4 John Locke (1600s) 4.2.5 William Blackstone (1700s) 4.2.6 David Hume (1700s) 4.3 Critique and response 4.3.1 Charles Comte - legitimate origin of property 4.3.2 Pierre Proudhon - property is theft 4.3.3 Frédéric Bastiat - property is value 4.4 Contemporary views 5 Types of property 6 What can be property? 6.1 Rights of use as property 7 Who can be an owner? 8 Whether and to what extent the State may interfere with property 9 See also 10 References 11 References 12 External links and references

Use of the term

Various scholarly communities (e.g., law, economics, anthropology, sociology) may treat the concept more systematically, but definitions vary within and between fields. Scholars in the social sciences frequently conceive of property as a bundle of rights. They stress that property is not a relationship between people and things, but a relationship between people with regard to things.

Public property is any property that is controlled by a state or by a whole community. Private property is any property that is not public property. Private property may be under the control of a single individual or by a group of individuals collectively.^[5] Some philosophers like Karl Marx use it to describe a social relationship between those who sell their labor power and those who buy it.

General characteristics

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Modern property rights conceive of ownership and possession as belonging to legal individuals, even if the legal individual is not a real person. Corporations, for example, have legal rights similar to American citizens, including many of their constitutional rights. Therefore, the corporation is a juristic person or artificial legal entity, which some refer to as "corporate personhood".

Property rights are protected in the current laws of states usually found in the form of a constitution or a bill of rights. The United States Constitution provides explicitly for the protection of private property in the Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment:

The Fifth Amendment states:

Nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The Fourteenth Amendment states:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

Protection is also found in the United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17, and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Article XVII, and in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), Protocol 1.

Property is usually thought of in terms of a bundle of rights as defined and protected by the local sovereignty. Ownership, however, does not necessarily equate with sovereignty. If ownership gave supreme authority it would be sovereignty, not ownership. These are two different concepts.

Traditional principles of property rights includes:

1. control of the use of the property
2. the right to any benefit from the property (examples: mining rights and rent)
3. a right to transfer or sell the property
4. a right to exclude others from the property.

Traditional property rights do not include:

1. uses that unreasonably interfere with the property rights of another private party (the right of quiet enjoyment). [See Nuisance]
2. uses that unreasonably interfere with public property rights, including uses that interfere with public health, safety, peace or convenience. [See Public Nuisance, Police Power]

Legal systems have evolved to cover the transactions and disputes which arise over the possession, use, transfer and disposal of property, most particularly involving contracts. Positive law defines such rights, and a judiciary is used to adjudicate and to enforce.

In his classic text, "The Common Law", Oliver Wendell Holmes describes property as having two fundamental aspects. The first is possession, which can be defined as control over a resource based on the practical inability of another to contradict the ends of the possessor. The second is title, which is the expectation that others will recognize rights to control resource, even when it is not in possession. He elaborates the differences between these two concepts, and proposes a history of how they came to be attached to individuals, as opposed to families or entities such as the church.

According to Adam Smith, the expectation of profit from "improving one's stock of capital" rests on private property rights. It is a belief central to capitalism that property rights encourage the property holders to develop the property, generate wealth, and efficiently allocate resources based on the operation of the market. From this evolved the modern conception of property as a right which is enforced by positive law, in the expectation that this would produce more wealth and better standards of living.

• Classical liberals, Objectivists, and related traditions

"Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property." (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged)

Most thinkers from these traditions subscribe to the labor theory of property. They hold that you own your own life, and it follows that you must own the products of that life, and that those products can be traded in free exchange with others.

"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself." (John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government)

"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." (Frédéric Bastiat, The Law)

"The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property." (John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government)

• Socialism's fundamental principles are centered on a critique of this concept, stating, among other things, that the cost of defending property is higher than the returns from private property ownership, and that even when property rights encourage the property-holder to develop his property, generate wealth, etc., he will only do so for his own benefit, which may not coincide with the benefit of other people or society at large.

• Libertarian socialism generally accepts property rights, but with a short abandonment time period. In other words, a person must make (more or less) continuous use of the item or else he loses ownership rights. This is usually referred to as "possession property" or "usufruct." Thus, in this usufruct system, absentee ownership is illegitimate, and workers own the machines they work with.

• Communism argues that only collective ownership of the means of production through a polity (though not necessarily a state) will assure the minimization of unequal or unjust outcomes and the maximization of benefits, and that therefore private property (which in communist theory is limited to capital) should be abolished.

Both communism and some kinds of socialism have also upheld the notion that private property is inherently illegitimate. This argument is centered mainly on the idea that the creation of private property will always benefit one class over another, giving way to domination through the use of this private property. Communists are naturally not opposed to personal property which is "Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned" (Communist Manifesto), by members of the proletariat.

Not every person, or entity, with an interest in a given piece of property may be able to exercise all of the rights mentioned a few paragraphs above. For example, as a lessee of a particular piece of property, you may not sell the property, because the tenant is only in possession, and does not have title to transfer. Similarly, while you are a lessee, the owner cannot use his or her right to exclude to keep you from the property. (Or, if he or she does, you may perhaps be entitled to stop paying rent or perhaps sue to regain access.)

Further, property may be held in a number of forms, e.g. joint ownership, community property, sole ownership, lease, etc. These different types of ownership may complicate an owner's ability to exercise his or her rights unilaterally. For example if two people own a single piece of land as joint tenants, then depending on the law in the jurisdiction, each may have limited recourse for the actions of the other. For example, one of the owners might sell his or her interest in the property to a stranger that the other owner does not particularly like.

Theories of property

There exist many theories. Perhaps one of the most popular was the natural rights definition of property rights as advanced by John Locke. Locke advanced the theory that when one mixes one’s labor with nature, one gains ownership of that part of nature with which the labor is mixed, subject to the limitation that there should be "enough, and as good, left in common for others." [2]

From the RERUM NOVARUM, Pope Leo XIII wrote "It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own."

Anthropology studies the diverse systems of ownership, rights of use and transfer, and possession^[6] under the term "theories of property." Western legal theory is based, as mentioned, on the owner of property being a legal individual. However, not all property systems are founded on this basis.

In every culture studied ownership and possession are the subject of custom and regulation, and "law" where the term can meaningfully be applied. Many tribal cultures balance individual ownership with the laws of collective groups: tribes, families, associations and nations. For example the 1839 Cherokee Constitution frames the issue in these terms:

Sec. 2. The lands of the Cherokee Nation shall remain common property; but the improvements made thereon, and in the possession of the citizens respectively who made, or may rightfully be in possession of them: Provided, that the citizens of the Nation possessing exclusive and indefeasible right to their improvements, as expressed in this article, shall possess no right or power to dispose of their improvements, in any manner whatever, to the United States, individual States, or to individual citizens thereof; and that, whenever any citizen shall remove with his effects out of the limits of this Nation, and become a citizen of any other government, all his rights and privileges as a citizen of this Nation shall cease: Provided, nevertheless, That the National Council shall have power to re-admit, by law, to all the rights of citizenship, any such person or persons who may, at any time, desire to return to the Nation, on memorializing the National Council for such readmission.

Communal property systems describe ownership as belonging to the entire social and political unit, while corporate systems describe ownership as being attached to an identifiable group with an identifiable responsible individual. The Roman property law was based on such a corporate system.

Different societies may have different theories of property for differing types of ownership. Pauline Peters argued that property systems are not isolable from the social fabric, and notions of property may not be stated as such, but instead may be framed in negative terms: for example the taboo system among Polynesian peoples. [3]

Property in philosophy

This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. (July 2007)

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe the term "property" essentially referred to land. Much rethinking was necessary in order for land to come to be regarded as only a special case of the property genus. This rethinking was inspired by at least three broad features of early modern Europe: the surge of commerce, the breakdown of efforts to prohibit interest (then called "usury"), and the development of centralized national monarchies.

Ancient philosophy

Urukagina, the king of the Sumerian city-state Lagash, established the first laws that forbade compelling the sale of property. The Cyrus cylinder of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, documents the protection of property rights.^[7]

The Ten Commandments shown in Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 stated that the Israelites were not to steal. These texts, written in approximately 1300 B.C., were a blanket early protection of private property.

Aristotle, in Politics, advocates "private property." In one of the first known expositions of tragedy of the commons he says, "that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual." In addition he says that when property is common, there are natural problems that arise due to differences in labor: "If they do not share equally enjoyments and toils, those who labor much and get little will necessarily complain of those who labor little and receive or consume much. But indeed there is always a difficulty in men living together and having all human relations in common, but especially in their having common property." (Politics, 1261b34)

Pre-industrial English philosophy

Thomas Hobbes (1600s)

The principal writings of Thomas Hobbes appeared between 1640 and 1651—during and immediately following the war between forces loyal to King Charles I and those loyal to Parliament. In his own words, Hobbes' reflection began with the idea of "giving to every man his own," a phrase he drew from the writings of Cicero. But he wondered: How can anybody call anything his own? He concluded: My own can only truly be mine if there is one unambiguously strongest power in the realm, and that power treats it as mine, protecting its status as such.

James Harrington (1600s)

A contemporary of Hobbes, James Harrington, reacted differently to the same tumult; he considered property natural but not inevitable. The author of Oceana, he may have been the first political theorist to postulate that political power is a consequence, not the cause, of the distribution of. He said that the worst possible situation is one in which the commoners have half a nation's property, with crown and nobility holding the other half—a circumstance fraught with instability and violence. A much better situation (a stable republic) will exist once the commoners own most property, he suggested.

In later years, the ranks of Harrington's admirers would include American revolutionary and founder John Adams.

Robert Filmer (1600s)

Another member of the Hobbes/Harrington generation, Sir Robert Filmer, reached conclusions much like Hobbes', but through Biblical exegesis. Filmer said that the institution of kingship is analogous to that of fatherhood, that subjects are but children, whether obedient or unruly, and that property rights are akin to the household goods that a father may dole out among his children—his to take back and dispose of according to his pleasure.

John Locke (1600s)

In the following generation, John Locke sought to answer Filmer, creating a rationale for a balanced constitution in which the monarch would have a part to play, but not an overwhelming part. Since Filmer's views essentially require that the Stuart family be uniquely descended from the patriarchs of the Bible, and since even in the late seventeenth century that was a difficult view to uphold, Locke attacked Filmer's views in his First Treatise on Government, freeing him to set out his own views in the Second Treatise on Civil Government. Therein, Locke imagined a pre-social world, the unhappy residents of which create a social contract. They would, he allowed, create a monarchy, but its task would be to execute the will of an elected legislature.

"To this end" he wrote, meaning the end of their own long life and peace, "it is that men give up all their natural power to the society they enter into, and the community put the legislative power into such hands as they think fit, with this trust, that they shall be governed by declared laws, or else their peace, quiet, and property will still be at the same uncertainty as it was in the state of nature."

Even when it keeps to proper legislative form, though, Locke held that there are limits to what a government established by such a contract might rightly do.

"It cannot be supposed that [the hypothetical contractors] they should intend, had they a power so to do, to give any one or more an absolute arbitrary power over their persons and estates, and put a force into the magistrate's hand to execute his unlimited will arbitrarily upon them; this were to put themselves into a worse condition than the state of nature, wherein they had a liberty to defend their right against the injuries of others, and were upon equal terms of force to maintain it, whether invaded by a single man or many in combination. Whereas by supposing they have given up themselves to the absolute arbitrary power and will of a legislator, they have disarmed themselves, and armed him to make a prey of them when he pleases..."

Note that both "persons and estates" are to be protected from the arbitrary power of any magistrate, inclusive of the "power and will of a legislator." In Lockean terms, depredations against an estate are just as plausible a justification for resistance and revolution as are those against persons. In neither case are subjects required to allow themselves to become prey.

To explain the ownership of property Locke advanced a labor theory of property.

William Blackstone (1700s)

In the 1760s, William Blackstone sought to codify the English common law. In his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England he wrote that "every wanton and causeless restraint of the will of the subject, whether produced by a monarch, a nobility, or a popular assembly is a degree of tyranny."

How should such tyranny be prevented or resisted? Through property rights, Blackstone thought, which is why he emphasized that indemnification must be awarded a non-consenting owner whose property is taken by eminent domain, and that a property owner is protected against physical invasion of his property by the laws of trespass and nuisance. Indeed, he wrote that a landowner is free to kill any stranger on his property between dusk and dawn, even an agent of the King, since it isn't reasonable to expect him to recognize the King's agents in the dark.^{[citation needed]}

David Hume (1700s)

In contrast to the figures discussed in this section thus far, David Hume lived a relatively quiet life that had settled down to a relatively stable social and political structure. He lived the life of a solitary writer until 1763 when, at 52 years of age, he went off to Paris to work at the British embassy.

In contrast, one might think, to his outrage-generating works on religion and his skeptical views in epistemology, Hume's views on law and property were quite conservative.

He did not believe in hypothetical contracts, or in the love of mankind in general, and sought to ground politics upon actual human beings as one knows them. "In general," he wrote, "it may be affirmed that there is no such passion in human mind, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, or services, or of relation to ourselves." Existing customs should not lightly be disregarded, because they have come to be what they are as a result of human nature. With this endorsement of custom comes an endorsement of existing governments, because he conceived of the two as complementary: "A regard for liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be subordinate to a reverence for established government."

These views led to a view on property rights that might today be described as legal positivism. There are property rights because of and to the extent that the existing law, supported by social customs, secure them.^[8] He offered some practical home-spun advice on the general subject, though, as when he referred to avarice as "the spur of industry," and expressed concern about excessive levels of taxation, which "destroy industry, by engendering despair."

Critique and response

By the mid 19th century, the industrial revolution had transformed England and had begun in France. The established conception of what constitutes property expanded beyond land to encompass scarce goods in general. In France, the revolution of the 1790s had led to large-scale confiscation of land formerly owned by church and king. The restoration of the monarchy led to claims by those dispossessed to have their former lands returned. Furthermore, the labor theory of value popularized by classical economists such as Adam Smith^{[citation needed]} and David Ricardo were utilized by a new ideology called socialism to critique the relations of property to other economic issues, such as profit, rent, interest, and wage-labor. Thus, property was no longer an esoteric philosophical question, but a political issue of substantial concern.

Charles Comte - legitimate origin of property

Charles Comte, in Traité de la propriété (1834), attempted to justify the legitimacy of private property in response to the Bourbon Restoration. According to David Hart, Comte had three main points: "firstly, that interference by the state over the centuries in property ownership has had dire consequences for justice as well as for economic productivity; secondly, that property is legitimate when it emerges in such a way as not to harm anyone; and thirdly, that historically some, but by no means all, property which has evolved has done so legitimately, with the implication that the present distribution of property is a complex mixture of legitimately and illegitimately held titles." (The Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer

Comte, as Proudhon would later do, rejected Roman legal tradition with its toleration of slavery. He posited a communal "national" property consisting of non-scarce goods, such as land in ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Since agriculture was so much more efficient than hunting and gathering, private property appropriated by someone for farming left remaining hunter-gatherers with more land per person, and hence did not harm them. Thus this type of land appropriation did not violate the Lockean proviso - there was "still enough, and as good left." Comte's analysis would be used by later theorists in response to the socialist critique on property.

Pierre Proudhon - property is theft

Main articles: What is Property? and Property is theft!

In his 1849 treatise What is Property?, Pierre Proudhon answers with "Property is theft!" In natural resources, he sees two types of property, de jure property (legal title) and de facto property (physical possession), and argues that the former is illegitimate. Proudhon's conclusion is that "property, to be just and possible, must necessarily have equality for its condition."

His analysis of the product of labor upon natural resources as property (usufruct) is more nuanced. He asserts that land itself cannot be property, yet it should be held by individual possessors as stewards of mankind with the product of labor being the property of the producer. Proudhon reasoned that any wealth gained without labor was stolen from those who labored to create that wealth. Even a voluntary contract to surrender the product of labor to an employer was theft, according to Proudhon, since the controller of natural resources had no moral right to charge others for the use of that which he did not labor to create and therefore did not own.

Proudhon's theory of property greatly influenced the budding socialist movement, inspiring anarchist theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin who modified Proudhon's ideas, as well as antagonizing theorists like Karl Marx.

Frédéric Bastiat - property is value

Frédéric Bastiat's main treatise on property can be found in chapter 8 of his book Economic Harmonies (1850). [4] In a radical departure from traditional property theory, he defines property not as a physical object, but rather as a relationship between people with respect to an object. Thus, saying one owns a glass of water is merely verbal shorthand for I may justly gift or trade this water to another person. In essence, what one owns is not the object but the value of the object. By "value," Bastiat apparently means market value; he emphasizes that this is quite different from utility. "In our relations with one another, we are not owners of the utility of things, but of their value, and value is the appraisal made of reciprocal services."

Strongly disputing Proudhon's equality-based argument, Bastiat theorizes that, as a result of technological progress and the division of labor, the stock of communal wealth increases over time; that the hours of work an unskilled laborer expends to buy e.g. 100 liters of wheat decreases over time, thus amounting to "gratis" satisfaction. Thus, private property continually destroys itself, becoming transformed into communal wealth. The increasing proportion of communal wealth to private property results in a tendency toward equality of mankind. "Since the human race started from the point of greatest poverty, that is, from the point where there were the most obstacles to be overcome, it is clear that all that has been gained from one era to the next has been due to the spirit of property."

This transformation of private property into the communal domain, Bastiat points out, does not imply that private property will ever totally disappear. This is because man, as he progresses, continually invents new and more sophisticated needs and desires.

Contemporary views

Among contemporary political thinkers who believe that human individuals enjoy rights to own property and to enter into contracts, there are two views about John Locke. On the one hand there are ardent Locke admirers, such as W.H. Hutt (1956), who praised Locke for laying down the "quintessence of individualism." On the other hand, there are those such as Richard Pipes who think that Locke's arguments are weak, and that undue reliance thereon has weakened the cause of individualism in recent times. Pipes has written that Locke's work "marked a regression because it rested on the concept of Natural Law" rather than upon Harrington's sociological framework.

Hernando de Soto has argued that an important characteristic of capitalist market economy is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded. These property rights and the whole formal system of property make possible:

• Greater independence for individuals from local community arrangements to protect their assets;
• Clear, provable, and protectable ownership;
• The standardization and integration of property rules and property information in the country as a whole;
• Increased trust arising from a greater certainty of punishment for cheating in economic transactions;
• More formal and complex written statements of ownership that permit the easier assumption of shared risk and ownership in companies, and insurance against risk;
• Greater availability of loans for new projects, since more things could be used as collateral for the loans;
• Easier access to and more reliable information regarding such things as credit history and the worth of assets;
• Increased fungibility, standardization and transferability of statements documenting the ownership of property, which paves the way for structures such as national markets for companies and the easy transportation of property through complex networks of individuals and other entities;
• Greater protection of biodiversity due to minimizing of shifting agriculture practices.

All of the above enhance economic growth.[5]

Types of property

This sign declaring a parking lot to be "private property" illustrates one method of identifying and protecting property. Note the citations to legal statutes.

Most legal systems distinguish different types (immovable property, estate in land, real estate, real property) of property, especially between land and all other forms of property - goods and chattels, movable property or personal property. They often distinguish tangible and intangible property (see below).

One categorization scheme specifies three species of property: land, improvements (immovable man made things) and personal property (movable man made things).

In common law, real property (immovable property) is the combination of interests in land and improvements thereto and personal property is interest in movable property.

'Real property' rights are rights relating to the land. These rights include ownership and usage. Owners can grant rights to persons and entities in the form of leases, licenses and easements.

Later, with the development of more complex forms of non-tangible property, personal property was divided into tangible property (such as cars, clothing, etc.) and intangible property (such as financial instruments, including stocks and bonds, etc.), and intellectual property, including (patents, copyrights, and trademarks).

What can be property?

The two major justifications given for original property, or homesteading, are effort and scarcity. John Locke emphasized effort, "mixing your labor" with an object, or clearing and cultivating virgin land. Benjamin Tucker preferred to look at the telos of property, i.e. What is the purpose of property? His answer: to solve the scarcity problem. Only when items are relatively scarce with respect to people's desires do they become property.[6] For example, hunter-gatherers did not consider land to be property, since there was no shortage of land. Agrarian societies later made arable land property, as it was scarce. For something to be economically scarce, it must necessarily have the exclusivity property - that use by one person excludes others from using it. These two justifications lead to different conclusions on what can be property. Intellectual property - non-corporeal things like ideas, plans, orderings and arrangements (musical compositions, novels, computer programs) - are generally considered valid property to those who support an effort justification, but invalid to those who support a scarcity justification (since they don't have the exclusivity property.) Thus even ardent propertarians may disagree about IP.[7] By either standard, one's body is one's property.

From some anarchist points of view, the validity of property depends on whether the "property right" requires enforcement by the state. Different forms of "property" require different amounts of enforcement: intellectual property requires a great deal of state intervention to enforce, ownership of distant physical property requires quite a lot, ownership of carried objects requires very little, while ownership of one's own body requires absolutely no state intervention.

Many things have existed that did not have an owner, sometimes called the commons. The term "commons," however, is also often used to mean something quite different: "general collective ownership" - i.e. common ownership. Also, the same term is sometimes used by statists to mean government-owned property that the general public is allowed to access. Law in all societies has tended to develop towards reducing the number of things not having clear owners. Supporters of property rights argue that this enables better protection of scarce resources, due to the tragedy of the commons, while critics argue that it leads to the exploitation of those resources for personal gain and that it hinders taking advantage of potential network effects. These arguments have differing validity for different types of "property" -- things which are not scarce are, for instance, not subject to the tragedy of the commons. Some apparent critics actually are advocating general collective ownership rather than ownerlessness.

Things today which do not have owners include: ideas (except for intellectual property), seawater (which is, however, protected by anti-pollution laws), parts of the seafloor (see the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea for restrictions), gasses in Earth's atmosphere, animals in the wild (though there may be restrictions on hunting etc. -- and in some legal systems, such as that of New York, they are actually treated as government property), celestial bodies and outer space, and land in Antarctica.

The nature of children under the age of majority is another contested issue here. In ancient societies children were generally considered the property of their parents. Children in most modern societies theoretically own their own bodies -- but they are considered incompetent to exercise their rights, and their parents or guardians are given most of the actual rights of control over them.

Questions regarding the nature of ownership of the body also come up in the issue of abortion and drugs.

In many ancient legal systems (e.g. early Roman law), religious sites (e.g. temples) were considered property of the God or gods they were devoted to. However, religious pluralism makes it more convenient to have religious sites owned by the religious body that runs them.

Intellectual property and air (airspace, no-fly zone, pollution laws, which can include tradeable emissions rights) can be property in some senses of the word.

Rights of use as property

Ownership of land can be held separately from the ownership of rights over that land, including sporting rights[8], mineral rights, development rights, air rights, and such other rights as may be worth segregating from simple land ownership.

Who can be an owner?

Main article: Ownership

Ownership laws may vary widely among countries depending on the nature of the property of interest (e.g. firearms, real property, personal property, animals). Individuals can own property directly. In most societies legal entities, such as corporations, trusts and nations (or governments) own property.

In the Inca empire, the dead emperors, who were considered gods, still controlled property after death.^[9].

Whether and to what extent the State may interfere with property

Under United States law the principal limitations on whether and the extent to which the State may interfere with property rights are set by the Constitution. The "Takings" clause requires that the government (whether state or federal----for the 14th Amendment's due process clause imposes the 5th Amendment's takings clause on state governments) may take private property only for a public purpose, after exercising due process of law, and upon making "just compensation." If an interest is not deemed a "property" right, or the conduct is merely an intentional tort, these limitations do not apply and the doctrine of sovereign immunity precludes relief.^[10] Moreover, if the interference does not almost completely make the property valueless, the interference will not be deemed a taking but instead a mere regulation of use.^[11] On the other hand, some governmental regulations of property use have been deemed so severe that they have been considered "regulatory takings."^[12] Moreover, conduct sometimes deemed only a nuisance or other tort has been held a taking of property where the conduct was sufficiently persistent and severe.^[13]

See also

Allemansrätten Anarchism Buying agent Capitalism Communism Homestead principle Immovable Property Inclusive Democracy Libertarian Lien Off plan Ownership society Patrimony Personal property Propertarian Property is theft Property law Property rights (economics) Labor theory of property Socialism Sovereignty

Property giving (legal) Charity Essenes Gift Kibbutz Monasticism Tithe, Zakat (modern sense) Property taking (legal) Adverse possession Confiscation Eminent domain Expropriation Fine Jizya Regulatory fees and costs Search and seizure Tariffs Tax Turf and twig (historical) Tithe, Zakat (historical sense) Zoning restrictions RS 2477

Property taking (illegal) Theft Kleptocracy Property of either digital or virtual form Emerging Virtual Institutions Property economists Armen Alchian Ronald Coase Hernando de Soto

References

1. ^ "property definition". http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/property.html. 
2. ^ "property", American Heritage Dictionary, http://www.bartleby.com/cgi-bin/texis/webinator/sitesearch?FILTER=col61&query=property&x=0&y=0 
3. ^ "property", WordNet, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=property&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o7=&o5=&o1=1&o6=&o4=&o3=&h= 
4. ^ Intellectual property is controversial among some.^[who?][1] See anti-copyright and criticism of intellectual property.
5. ^ Understanding Principles of Politics and the State, by John Schrems, PageFree Publishing (2004), page 234
6. ^ Hann, Chris A new double movement? Anthropological perspectives on property in the age of neoliberalism Socio-Economic Review, Volume 5, Number 2, April 2007, pp. 287-318(32)
7. ^ Arthur Henry Robertson, John Graham Merrills (1996). Human Rights in the World: An Introduction to the Study of the International Protection of Human Rights. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719049237.
8. ^ This view is reflected in the opinion of the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Willow River Power Co..
9. ^ Mckay, John P. , 2004, "A History of World Societes". Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company
10. ^ See, for example, United States v. Willow River Power Co. (not a property right because force of law not behind it); Schillinger v. United States, 155 U.S. 163 (1894) (patent infringement is tort, not taking of property); Zoltek Corp. v. United States, 442 F.3d 1345 (Fed. Cir. 2006).
11. ^ Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978).
12. ^ See United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, Inc., 474 U.S. 121 *(1985).
13. ^ United States v. Causby, 328 U.S. 256 (1946).

References

• Frédéric Bastiat, 1850. Economic Harmonies. W. Hayden Boyers, trans.; George B. de Huszar, ed. Liberty Fund.
• Dean Russell, "The Law", 1850.
• Tom Bethell, 1998. The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages. New York: St. Martin's Press.
• William Blackstone, 1765-69. Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. Oxford Univ. Press. Especially Books the Second and Third.
• Hernando De Soto, 1989. The Other Path. Harper & Row.
• Hernando De Soto and Francis Cheneval, 2006. Realizing Property Rights. Ruffer & Rub.
• Ellickson, Robert, 1993, "Property in LandPDF (6.40 MiB)", Yale Law Journal 102: 1315-1400.
• Richard Pipes, 1999. Property and Freedom.
• Mckay, John P. , 2004, "A History of World Societes". Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

External links and references

• Property Law Case Summaries
• Private Property, Freedom, and the Rule of Law
• "Right to Private Property", Tibor Machan, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "The Ethics and Economics of Private Property", Hans-Hermann Hoppe, van Mises Institute

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - ejendom, ejendomsret, egenskab, rekvisit, handling

idioms:

• property man    rekvisitør, scenetekniker

Nederlands (Dutch)
bezit, eigendom, eigenschap, onroerend goed, rekwisiet

Français (French)
n. - propriété, biens, biens immobiliers, dans l'immobilier, (Chim, Phys) propriété, (Jur) propriété

idioms:

• property man    accessoiriste

Deutsch (German)
n. - Grundbesitz, Eigentum, Eigenschaft

idioms:

• property man    Requisiteur

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ιδιοκτησία, (ακίνητη) περιουσία, ακίνητο, κτήμα, (χαρακτηριστική) ιδιότητα, κυριότητα, (στο θέατρο κ.λπ.) σκηνικό στοιχείο, βοηθητικό, αξεσουάρ

idioms:

• property man    φροντιστής θεάτρου

Italiano (Italian)
proprietà fondiaria, proprietà, qualità, beni, beni mobili

idioms:

• property man    trovarobe

Português (Portuguese)
n. - propriedade (f)

idioms:

• property man    contra-regra

Русский (Russian)
имущество, собственность, свойство, реквизит, театральная мебель и т.д.

idioms:

• property man    реквизитор, бутафор

Español (Spanish)
n. - propiedad, posesión, característica, bienes, dominio, accesorio

idioms:

• property man    accesorista, attrezzista

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - egendom, ägodelar, fastighet (er), tomt, egenskap, rekvisita (teat.)

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
财产, 性质, 所有权

idioms:

• property man    道具管理人, 装备管理员

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 財產, 性質, 所有權

idioms:

• property man    道具管理人, 裝備管理員

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 재산, 자산

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 財産, 資産, 所有地, 特性, 特質, 所有物, 著作権, 小道具

idioms:

• property man    小道具係, 小道具方

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) ملك, أراضي, أبنيه, مال, خاصيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮רכוש, נכס, אחוזה, סגולה, בעלות, זכות הבעלות, נדל"ן, אבזר במה, אבזר באולפן הסרטה, תכונה המאפיינת סוג מסוים אולם לא מבדילה אותו בהכרח מסוגים אחרים‬

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