Goldilocks, Aragorn, and the Essence of Property

摘要

The current debate over conceptual property theory is in many ways a debate over semantics. But semantics are vitally important. The formulations we use to describe property matter in that they influence the legal and political conversation about property rights and ownership. The critics of the bundle formulation argue that it obscures key attributes of property that serve to protect the coherence of the institution against infringement by the state. The modern bundle formulation suggests that when an owner says to another, "This belongs to me," he says virtually nothing. Because the bundle can contain or exclude any number of individual rights, the nonowner knows nothing for certain about how he ought to interact with the things he does not own.