[From my Webnote series]
Related:
From Stephan Kinsella, “What Libertarianism Is,” Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023):
Property as a Right between People
Moreover, as noted in “A Libertarian Theory of Contract” (ch. 9), n.1, property rights can be conceived of not as a right between a human actor and an owned object, but rather as a right as between human actors, but with respect to particular (owned) resources.
As Judge Alex Kozinski writes:
But what is property? That is not an easy question to answer. I remember sitting in my first-year property course on the first day of class when the professor … asked the fundamental question: What are property rights? … I threw up my hand and without even waiting to be called on I shouted out, “Property rights define the relationship between people and their property.”
Professor Krier stopped dead in his tracks, spun around, and gave me a long look. Finally he said: “That’s very peculiar, Mr. Kozinski. Have you always had relations with inanimate objects? Most people I know have relations with other people.”
That was certainly not the last time I said something really dumb in class, but the lesson was not lost on me. Property rights are, of course, a species of relationships between people. At the minimum, they define the degree to which individuals may exclude other individuals from the use and enjoyment of their goods and services….[53]
[53] Alex Kozinski, “Of Profligacy, Piracy, and Private Property,” Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1990; https://perma.cc/Z8AD-634V): 17–21, p. 19. See further references in “A Libertarian Theory of Contract” (ch. 9), n.1.
***
- Re ch. 2, Appendix I, “Property as a Right between People,” and ch. 9, n.1, see Gerard Casey, “Can You Own Yourself?“, Research Depository UCD Dublin (Dec. 2011): “legal (or jural) relations obtain between people in relation to things (in the limiting case, themselves) and not directly between people and things”. See also Eric R. Claeys, Natural Property Rights (Cambridge U. Press, 2025), §4.2, p. 77, “property is a law of things inasmuch as it consists of social relations between people regarding separable resources.” Citing Henry E. Smith, “Property as the Law of Things,” Harvard Law Review 125 (7) (2012): 1691–1726. Also Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford 1988), pp. 26–27 (“Consider the relation between a person (call her Susan) and an object (say, a motor car) generally taken to be her private property. The layman thinks of this as a two-place relation of ownership between a person and a thing: Susan owns that Porsche. But the lawyer tells us that legal relations cannot exist between people and Porsches, because Porsches cannot have rights or duties or be bound by or recognize rules. The legal relation involved must be a relation between persons—between Susan and her neighbours, say, or Susan and the police, or Susan and everyone else.“).
- See also Sprankling, op cit., §1.01: “In general, the law defines property as rights4 among people5 that concern things. [4. While property is commonly discussed in terms of “rights,” perhaps “relationships” would be a better term. See §1.03[C], infra.]”
