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Natural Property Rights

Author(s):
Eric R. Claeys
Posted:
08-2025
Legal Studies #:
25-15

ABSTRACT:

Natural Property Rights presents a novel theory of property based on individual, pre-political rights. A just system of property protects people's rights to use resources, and it also orders those rights consistent with natural law and the public welfare. Drawing on influential property theorists such as Grotius, Locke, Blackstone, and early American statesmen and judges, as well as recent work in normative and analytical philosophy, Natural Property Rights shows how natural rights guide political and legal reasoning about property law. It examines how natural rights justify the most familiar institutions in property, including public property, ownership, the system of estates and future interests, leases, servitudes, mortgages, police regulation, and eminent domain. The book studies examples familiar from the law covering tangible resources; chattels, real property, energy, and water law. Thought-provoking and comprehensive, Natural Property Rights shows how property at once secures individual freedom and serves the common good.

Although Natural Property Rights repays study on its own, it also offers an important alternative to contemporary perspectives on property. In relation to philosophy and political-theory scholarship, Natural Property Rights justifies property as the object of a right. But the right is not grounded in autonomy as it is in the political theories of Robert Nozick and many other libertarians; it is grounded instead in foundations associated with perfectionism, eudaimonism, and human flourishing. And the book reminds philosophers and political theorists how many factors besides analytic concepts and normative foundations matter in property; it shows how legal property rights develop from practical reasoning and the specification of general prepolitical rights.

In relation to legal scholarship, Natural Property Rights offers an important alternative to the normative theories that loom largest today—Progressive property, law and economics, and  expertise-driven approaches to property (as in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe-Regional Planning Agency (2002) and Kelo v. New London (2005)). Consistent with Progressive property, natural law and rights link property to human flourishing. But natural law and rights still justify property as the object of an individual right, and not as an entitlement to do what regulators or judges think will contribute to flourishing in the relevant community. Consistent with the best law-and-economics scholarship, natural law and rights guide reasoning about the effects of recognizing property rights in law. But natural law and rights address familiar challenges faced by law and economics—about when and why legal systems have legitimate political authority to coerce citizens, with the state’s monopoly over violence, to obey efficient rules. And natural law and rights reconcile individual property rights with the public welfare as called for in expertise-driven approaches—without threatening individual freedom as those approaches do.