There is a widespread misunderstanding that “property” – the
term – refers to nouns, such as “house” or “car” or (piece of)
“land”. That is not the case in law and philosophy, where
property most commonly is understood as social relations with
regard to things. Here is an excerpt from ‘Properties of
Property: A Jurisprudential Analysis‘ (pp: 160-165) that comes
to terms with the basics of property as social relations. Get it
with all formatting, footnotes, page numbers as intended in this
PDF. Property as social relations. To begin with, then, we need
to overcome the idea that property is a simple person-thing
relation that implies an absolute (or even conditional)
entitlement: “We often think of property as some version of
entitlement to things: I have a right to this thing or that. In
a more sophisticated version of property, of course, we see
property as a way of defining our relationships with other
people. On such versions, my right to this thing or that isn’t
about controlling the “thing” so much as it