Book Description

"Property Law in the Society of Equals is an account of the property law and its justificatory foundations. It begins with the common worry that property is an inegalitarian institution and shows that, contrary to the worry, property is actually an essential constituent of a society of equals. Property law is the solution to the Problem of Yours and Mine, a moral problem about the impossibility of our relating to one another on terms of equality absent an institution that allows us to have things as our own. This understanding of property not only shows why property is required for us to have equal relations, it also provides a distinctive perspective on the ways in which our current institutions of property are defective from their own internal point of view and require radical reform. The book uses this abstract account to explain contemporary property law. The book explains private law doctrines including trespass, licence, nuisance, acquisition, transfer, tenancy, the law of servitudes; it also illuminates the boundaries between property rights and personal rights and between property rights and contract rights, and explores various liminal cases of property through that lens. In addition, the book critiques property internally, showing how property's justification requires a state to provide homes to all of its subjects and showing how other parts of the public law of property, including various forms of land use regulation, should be understood as part of the law of property rather than external limitations on it"--