The Public Nature of Private Property

Abstract American legal academics describe private property as a set of private rights. However, liberal ideas of private control poorly describe legal practices, and thus the bundle of rights is a misleading metaphor for private property. Indeed, social theorists have long understood that property is not the ownership of a thing or a set of individual rights, but a set of social agreements about what ownership entails. In the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century, constituents have expected governments to protect the value in their properties, not just their control over the resources. Property rules involve government intimately not only in creating value but also in determining who deserves which valuable resources.