The Concept of Property

Bentham states the premise of this chapter with unusual candor. Property is not a physical fact; it is a legal institution. Land, chattels, chattels-in-action, patents, easements, and every other propertied interest exist as property only because the legal order recognizes, defines, and enforces a set of relations among persons with respect to a resource. Chapter 2 explained how Anglo-American property law developed. This chapter explains what property is.

1. Property is a legal relation. Property describes legally recognized relations among persons with respect to a resource, not a relation between a person and a thing.
2. Property is a legally protected interest. The Restatement (First) of Property defines property in terms of legal relations enforceable against ascertained persons or against persons generally.
3. Ownership is a composite. The rights of exclusion, use, enjoyment, income, transfer, and devise are analytically separable and doctrinally recombinable.
4. Hohfeldian analysis is descriptive. Rights, privileges, powers, and immunities — and their correlatives — remain the most rigorous vocabulary for describing propertied relations, whether or not one accepts the wider theoretical program.
5. The bundle-of-rights framework is a working metaphor, not a definition. American courts and Restatements treat property as a divisible aggregate of legally protected interests; competing thing-ownership and information-cost theories are debated in the scholarship but do not displace the doctrine.
6. Possession is not ownership. Actual, constructive, and legal possession are doctrinally distinct from title and produce independent legal consequences.
7. Title is not ownership. Legal title, equitable title, record title, and marketable title are distinct concepts, each performing a discrete doctrinal function.
8. Property is inherently limited. Every propertied interest is subject to the police power, eminent domain, taxation, and the general operation of law; unlimited ownership is unknown to Anglo-American law.
9. The common law and the civil law diverge. Civilian dominium is unitary; common-law property is fragmented into estates, interests, and legal-equitable pairs.
10. The conceptual framework is load-bearing. Every subsequent chapter of this treatise — classifications, possession, estates, future interests, servitudes, land use, and finance — depends on the vocabulary and analytical structure this chapter establishes.

• State the legal concept of property as a set of relations among persons with respect to a resource.
• Apply Hohfeldian vocabulary — rights, duties, privileges, no-rights, powers, liabilities, immunities, disabilities — to concrete property problems.
• Enumerate Honoré's incidents of ownership and identify which incidents are present, absent, or attenuated in a given interest.
• Distinguish ownership, possession, and title, and explain the doctrinal work each does.
• Distinguish legal from equitable interests, and possessory from non-possessory interests.
• Explain the constitutional and general-law limits on property under the police power, eminent domain, and taxation.
• Contrast common-law and civil-law conceptions of ownership.
• Diagnose and correct the recurring lay misconceptions about property.

• U.S. Const. amend. V (Takings and Due Process); amend. XIV, § 1 (Due Process; Equal Protection).
• U.S. Const. art. I, § 10, cl. 1 (Contracts Clause).
• Restatement (First) of Property §§ 1–10 (1936) (defining rights, privileges, powers, immunities, and their correlatives with respect to land and things other than land).
• Restatement (Third) of Property: Servitudes § 1.1 (2000) (defining servitude as a legal relation).
• Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers §§ 1.1, 6.1 (1999–2011).
• Restatement (Third) of Property: Mortgages § 1.1 (1997).
• Uniform Commercial Code §§ 1-201(b)(35), 2-107, 9-102, 9-334.
• Uniform Trust Code §§ 401–405 (2000).
• Statute of Frauds, 29 Chas. 2, c. 3 (1677) (received into American law).
• Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).
• Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1805).
• Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922).
• Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978).
• Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., 458 U.S. 419 (1982).
• Kaiser Aetna v. United States, 444 U.S. 164 (1979).
• Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564 (1972).
• International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918).
• Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 51 Cal. 3d 120 (1990).

• Wesley N. Hohfeld, Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, 23 Yale L.J. 16 (1913); 26 Yale L.J. 710 (1917).
• A.M. Honoré, Ownership, in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence 107 (A.G. Guest ed., 1961).
• 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England *2 (1766).
• Thomas W. Merrill, Property and the Right to Exclude, 77 Neb. L. Rev. 730 (1998).
• Thomas W. Merrill & Henry E. Smith, What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?, 111 Yale L.J. 357 (2001).
• Henry E. Smith, Property as the Law of Things, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 1691 (2012).
• J.E. Penner, The Idea of Property in Law (1997).
• Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (1988).
• Stephen R. Munzer, A Theory of Property (1990).
• Powell on Real Property (Michael Allan Wolf ed., current ed.).
• Stoebuck & Whitman, The Law of Property (3d ed. 2000).
• Cornelius J. Moynihan & Sheldon F. Kurtz, Introduction to the Law of Real Property (5th ed. 2015).
• Restatement (First) of Property, Introductory Note & §§ 1–10 (1936).

The first proposition of American property law is that property is a legal relation. It is not a physical object, not a place, and not an attribute of a person. It is a set of jural relations recognized and enforced by law among persons with respect to a resource. The land, chattel, patent, or account receivable is the res — the thing to which the relations attach — but the res is not itself the property. The property is the constellation of legally protected interests through which the law defines who may do what with respect to the res, and against whom those interests are enforceable.

The Restatement (First) of Property adopted this analytical premise explicitly. Its Introductory Note explains that the term “property” is used in the Restatement “to denote legal relations between persons with respect to a thing.” §§ 1–10 then define those relations — right, privilege, power, immunity — and their correlatives. The definitional apparatus is not merely academic; it supplies the vocabulary in which every subsequent Restatement and virtually every modern American treatise on property has been written.

Blackstone's often-quoted formulation — that property is “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe,” 2 Blackstone, Commentaries *2 — captures the popular imagination but not the doctrine. Blackstone himself immediately qualified the passage, and no American court has ever treated ownership as unqualified. The relational conception of property, not the despotic conception, governs the case law and the Restatements.

A propertied interest is one the legal order recognizes and enforces. The Supreme Court has articulated the point in constitutional terms. In Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 577 (1972), the Court explained that property interests “are not created by the Constitution. Rather, they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law.” Property, in other words, is not a natural fact of which the law takes note; it is a legal creation whose existence and content are ascertained by consulting the legal order.

This premise has three doctrinal consequences of first importance. First, whether an interest is “property” is itself a legal question, answered by reference to statute, common law, and Restatement, not by ordinary language or economic intuition. Second, the content of a propertied interest — what its holder may do, what others must refrain from doing, and against whom the interest is enforceable — is fixed by law. Third, property may be created, redefined, or extinguished by the legal order, subject to the constitutional constraints considered in Part VII below.

Wesley N. Hohfeld's analytical scheme, first published in the Yale Law Journal in 1913 and 1917, remains the most precise vocabulary the common-law tradition possesses for describing propertied relations. Hohfeld observed that lawyers use the word “right” to describe four analytically distinct positions and grouped them into two tables of four jural correlatives and four jural opposites. Understanding the scheme is a prerequisite to reading the Restatements accurately.

The first-order relations are right and duty. If A has a right that B not enter Blackacre, B has a correlative duty not to enter. The second-order relations are privilege and no-right. If A has a privilege to enter Blackacre, B has a no-right that A refrain — that is, B cannot complain of the entry. The third-order relations are power and liability. If A has a legal power to convey Blackacre, B (the transferee) has a correlative liability to have his legal position changed by A's exercise of the power. The fourth-order relations are immunity and disability. If A has an immunity from suit for entering Blackacre, B has a correlative disability to sue.

Applied to property, the scheme dissolves apparent puzzles. To say that A “owns” Blackacre is shorthand for a large cluster of Hohfeldian positions: a right that others not enter or use; a privilege to enter and use himself; a power to alienate, lease, mortgage, and devise; and an immunity from having his position altered by unilateral action of a private stranger. To say that the state has “regulated” that ownership is to describe a rearrangement of some of those positions — for example, the state has increased A's duties (to comply with zoning) and, correspondingly, decreased A's privileges.

In 1961 A.M. Honoré published Ownership, an essay that has since supplied the most influential enumeration of the components of full liberal ownership. Honoré identified eleven “standard incidents” that, in his account, together constitute the fullest ownership known to a mature legal system: (1) the right to possess; (2) the right to use; (3) the right to manage; (4) the right to the income; (5) the right to the capital; (6) the right to security; (7) the incident of transmissibility; (8) the incident of absence of term; (9) the duty to prevent harm; (10) liability to execution; and (11) the incident of residuarity.

Honoré did not claim that every propertied interest contains all eleven incidents. On the contrary, his analytical point was that the incidents are separable and recombinable, and that the presence of some rather than others produces the familiar catalogue of lesser interests — life estates, leaseholds, easements, licenses, security interests, and trust beneficial interests. The Honoré framework thereby provides the analytic bridge between the Hohfeldian vocabulary and the doctrinal categories that occupy the remainder of this treatise.

The metaphor of property as a “bundle of rights” — or, more precisely, a bundle of legally protected interests — is the working conception of American property law. It appears in the Restatement (First) of Property's Introductory Note, in Powell and in Stoebuck & Whitman, in the Supreme Court's regulatory-takings jurisprudence (see Kaiser Aetna v. United States, 444 U.S. 164, 176 (1979), describing the “bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property”), and in innumerable state-court decisions. The framework is descriptive: it explains why doctrine can recognize an ownership interest simultaneously with a leasehold, a mortgage, an easement, and a covenant, each held by a different person and each protected by law.

The bundle metaphor has been criticized. Thomas Merrill, Henry Smith, and J.E. Penner have argued in a body of influential scholarship that the bundle image obscures the essentially in rem, thing-focused character of property and its function as an information-economizing device for coordinating the behavior of strangers. See Merrill, Property and the Right to Exclude, 77 Neb. L. Rev. 730 (1998); Merrill & Smith, What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?, 111 Yale L.J. 357 (2001); Smith, Property as the Law of Things, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 1691 (2012); Penner, The Idea of Property in Law (1997). These accounts emphasize the right to exclude as the definitional core of property and treat the bundle as the periphery.

“Ownership” is the residual, presumptively unlimited holding of a propertied interest, subject to whatever legal constraints the legal order imposes. Powell describes ownership as “the aggregate of legal rights, privileges, powers, and immunities that a person may exercise with respect to a thing.” That formulation captures the composite quality of ownership and its dependence on the underlying jural relations.

American doctrine consistently identifies a core cluster of incidents that together characterize ownership in its ordinary sense. The catalogue below is the working checklist; individual states elaborate it in local doctrine.

• Exclusive possession. The owner is presumptively entitled to occupy the res to the exclusion of others.
• The right to exclude. The Supreme Court has repeatedly described the right to exclude as “one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property.” Kaiser Aetna, 444 U.S. at 176; see Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., 458 U.S. 419, 435 (1982).
• The right to use and enjoy. Subject to nuisance, zoning, and other regulation.
• The right to income and profits. Rents, royalties, dividends, and other yield of the res.
• The right to transfer inter vivos. By sale, gift, lease, mortgage, or other conveyance.
• The right to devise or bequeath. By will or, by operation of intestate succession, to heirs.
• The right to destroy. Attenuated at common law and further constrained by modern statute (historic preservation, environmental regulation, animal-cruelty laws).
• Residuarity. The owner retains everything not carved out to another.

No American jurisdiction recognizes an ownership interest free of all limits. Every ownership interest is subject to the police power, eminent domain, taxation, the general operation of law (tort, contract, nuisance), and the doctrine that use of one's property may not unreasonably harm another (sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas). See Part VII.

Possession is the physical or constructive control of the res coupled with the intent to control. It is doctrinally distinct from ownership. Possession may exist without ownership (the finder of a lost chattel; the adverse possessor before the running of the statute; the bailee); ownership may exist without possession (the landlord during the term of the lease; the mortgagor of Blackacre in the hands of the mortgagee-in-possession; the bailor). Yet possession is a load-bearing category: it is the foundation of the trespass and ejectment actions, of the doctrine of finders, of adverse possession, of accession, of bailment, and — through the doctrine of livery of seisin and its recording-act successors — of the historical mechanics of conveyance.

Anglo-American doctrine distinguishes three principal modes of possession.

• Actual possession. Physical occupation or control of the res coupled with the intent to hold it as one's own. Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1805), states the classical requirement that pursuit alone is insufficient; the actor must exercise dominion.
• Constructive possession. Possession attributed by law to a person who is not in physical occupation, most commonly the holder of record title in a state that treats record title as presumptive possession, or the possessor of part of a tract who is deemed to possess the whole under color of title.
• Legal possession. The right to possession recognized by law, whether or not accompanied by physical control. A tenant has legal possession during the term; the landlord has a reversionary right to future possession but not legal possession during the term.

The doctrinal significance of possession is that the possessor holds a legally protected interest even against those with a better title, except the person with the best title. The classical case is Armory v. Delamirie, 1 Strange 505 (K.B. 1722): the finder of a jewel has a possessory interest good against all but the true owner. Possession, in the received phrase, is nine points of the law — not because it is ownership, but because it is the presumptive base line from which title disputes are litigated.

“Title” denotes the legal basis for asserting ownership. It is not synonymous with ownership; a person may own without holding record title (the equitable owner under a purchase-money resulting trust) or hold record title without full beneficial ownership (the trustee). American doctrine distinguishes several title concepts.

• Legal title. Title cognizable at law, evidenced by a valid conveyance in the form required by the Statute of Frauds and, for land, by the operation of the recording acts and, historically, by livery of seisin.
• Equitable title. Title recognized in equity, held for example by the beneficiary of a trust, the purchaser under an installment land contract after equitable conversion, or the beneficiary of a constructive trust. See Restatement (Third) of Trusts § 2 (2003).
• Record title. Title as it appears in the public land records under the operative recording act (race, notice, or race-notice). Record title is what a title search discloses; it is the primary object of the recording statutes and the title-insurance industry.
• Marketable title. Title that a prudent purchaser, informed of the facts, would accept as reasonably free from doubt as to material questions of law or fact. The marketable-title standard controls the vendor's obligation under a land-sale contract at common law and is now supplemented in many jurisdictions by the Uniform Marketable Record Title Act.
• Chain of title. The sequence of successive transfers evidenced by the record. The chain-of-title concept is treated at length in the recording-and-conveyancing chapters; it is introduced here only to complete the vocabulary.

The persistent equity–law division in American title doctrine is a direct inheritance of the Chancery jurisdiction traced in Chapter 2. Where the same interest is held simultaneously by two persons — one at law, one in equity — the doctrinal apparatus of the trust, the constructive trust, equitable conversion, and the equitable mortgage manages the resulting complexity.

Anglo-American property doctrine classifies propertied interests along several intersecting axes. Each axis is introduced here in vocabulary only; the detailed doctrinal treatment appears in later Parts of this volume.

• Present interests. Interests entitling the holder to present possession or enjoyment (fee simple absolute, life estate, term of years).
• Future interests. Interests entitling the holder to possession or enjoyment at some future time (reversions, remainders, executory interests, possibilities of reverter, rights of entry). See Part V of this volume.
• Legal interests. Interests recognized and enforced in courts of law.
• Equitable interests. Interests recognized in equity, including the beneficial interests under trusts and equitable easements and servitudes.
• Possessory interests. Interests giving the holder the right to occupy the res.
• Non-possessory interests. Interests attached to land but not giving the holder any right to occupy — easements, real covenants, equitable servitudes, profits, licenses, mortgages, and mechanics' liens. See Restatement (Third) of Property: Servitudes § 1.1 (2000).

The taxonomy is doctrinal, not merely descriptive. Whether an interest is present or future determines the statute of limitations on ejectment and the running of adverse possession against it. Whether an interest is legal or equitable determines the forum and the available remedies. Whether an interest is possessory or non-possessory determines whether trespass or a nuisance-style action is the appropriate protective action, and whether the interest is subject to (or protected by) the recording acts.

Because property is created and defined by the legal order, every propertied interest is subject to the powers the legal order retains. Four such powers form the constitutional and general-law envelope within which private property operates in the United States.

• Police power. The reserved authority of the states to regulate private conduct — including the use of property — for the public health, safety, morals, and welfare. Zoning, environmental regulation, and nuisance abatement are exercises of this power.
• Eminent domain. The power of the sovereign to take private property for public use upon payment of just compensation. U.S. Const. amend. V; incorporated against the states, Chicago, B. & Q. R.R. v. Chicago, 166 U.S. 226 (1897).
• Taxation. The power to impose ad valorem, transfer, and income taxation on property and on transactions in property. Property held free of taxation exists in American law only by express legislative exemption.
• The general operation of law. Property is subject to the ordinary rules of tort, contract, restitution, and equity, including nuisance, trespass, and the rule against unreasonable interference with a neighbor's use.

The constitutional constraints on the exercise of these powers are the subject of Part IX of this volume (Land Use Controls — Nuisance, Zoning, Takings). The point here is conceptual: the existence of these powers is not an intrusion upon ownership; it is a definitional feature of ownership as American law has always known it. Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922), and Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978), together frame the doctrinal boundary between permissible regulation and compensable taking.

Anglo-American property doctrine is not the only mature system for organizing legal relations with respect to resources. The civil-law tradition — descended through the Corpus Juris Civilis, the medieval glossators, the Code Napoléon, the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, and their derivatives — organizes property around the concept of dominium: a unitary, absolute, and residual right of ownership vested in a single titleholder and defined by law. Reading American doctrine against that comparator clarifies what is distinctive about the common-law approach.

Three structural differences deserve special notice. First, the common law fragments what the civil law unifies. The civilian owner holds dominium; the common-law owner holds an estate, which is a temporally limited slice of the ultimate freehold. The estate system, itself the inheritance of feudal tenure and the doctrine of seisin, permits multiple simultaneous holders of coordinated propertied interests in the same res (life tenant and remainderman; landlord and tenant; mortgagor and mortgagee; trustee and beneficiary) in a way that the civil law achieves, if at all, through separate institutions of usufruct, superficies, and fideicommissum.

Second, the common law's persistent bifurcation of legal and equitable title has no true civilian analogue. The trust, in particular, is a common-law institution; its civilian imitations (the German Treuhand, the French fiducie, the mixed-jurisdiction devices of Louisiana, Quebec, and South Africa) are statutory recreations rather than organic developments.

Third, the common-law preference for the incremental case-by-case development of doctrine produces a body of property law that is defined less by code than by decision, Restatement, and Uniform Act, and that remains more permeable to the influence of equity and of scholarship than the codified civilian systems. This treatise operates within that tradition.

Five misconceptions about property recur in lay discussion, in political rhetoric, and even in occasional judicial opinions. Each is doctrinally false; each obscures the analytical framework this chapter has developed.

1. “Property means absolute ownership.” American law recognizes no absolute ownership. Every propertied interest is subject to the police power, eminent domain, taxation, and the general operation of law. See Part VII.
2. “Possession is ownership.” Possession and ownership are doctrinally distinct. Possession may be actual, constructive, or legal, and may be held by a person who is not the owner (bailee, tenant, adverse possessor, finder). See Part IV.
3. “Title and ownership are identical.” Title is the legal basis for asserting ownership; ownership is the composite of legally protected interests. Legal title, equitable title, record title, and marketable title each perform a discrete doctrinal function. See Part V.
4. “Property is only physical land.” Property extends to chattels, choses in action, negotiable instruments, intangibles, intellectual property, and, under limited conditions, informational and quasi-property interests. See International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918); Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 51 Cal. 3d 120 (1990).
5. “Property rights are unlimited.” No propertied interest in Anglo-American law is unlimited. The constitutional and general-law envelope described in Part VII operates on every propertied interest, however styled.

The conceptual apparatus developed in this chapter is the analytical toolkit of the treatise. Every subsequent chapter presupposes it. When Chapter 4 distinguishes real from personal property and introduces the doctrine of fixtures, it does so by locating each classification within the Hohfeldian vocabulary and the bundle-of-rights framework established here. When Part III addresses first possession, capture, and finders, it operates on the doctrinal distinction between possession and ownership developed in Part IV above. When Part IV treats estates in land, it deploys Honoré's incidents to explain how the fee simple, the fee tail, the life estate, and the defeasible fees differ. When Part V treats future interests, it relies on the present–future distinction introduced in Part VI. When Part VIII treats servitudes, it depends on the possessory–non-possessory distinction. And when Part IX treats takings and land use, it applies the police-power and eminent-domain framework of Part VII.

A properly trained property lawyer therefore approaches every problem by asking three questions in sequence. First: what are the jural relations at stake — which rights, duties, privileges, powers, and immunities does the law recognize among which persons with respect to which res? Second: how does the legal order classify the interests those relations constitute — present or future, legal or equitable, possessory or non-possessory, real or personal? Third: what constitutional and general-law constraints operate on those interests? The habit of asking these questions in order is the operational payoff of the conceptual work of this chapter.

• Property is a legal relation among persons with respect to a resource, not a relation between a person and a thing. The Restatement (First) of Property adopts this analytical premise.
• Whether an interest is “property” and what its content is are legal questions answered by reference to statute, common law, and the Restatements. Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564 (1972).
• Hohfeldian analysis — rights, duties, privileges, no-rights, powers, liabilities, immunities, disabilities — supplies the most rigorous vocabulary for describing propertied relations.
• Honoré's eleven standard incidents of ownership are separable and recombinable; their varying combinations generate the familiar catalogue of lesser interests.
• American courts and Restatements treat property as a bundle of legally protected interests; the thing-ownership and information-cost accounts of Merrill, Smith, and Penner are influential critiques that refine but have not displaced the bundle framework.
• Ownership is a composite of the rights of exclusion, use, enjoyment, income, transfer, devise, and destruction, coupled with residuarity; every ownership interest is subject to constitutional and general-law limits.
• Possession — actual, constructive, or legal — is distinct from ownership and is a load-bearing category of the trespass, ejectment, finders, adverse possession, and bailment doctrines.
• Title — legal, equitable, record, and marketable — is the legal basis for asserting ownership and is not synonymous with ownership itself.
• Property interests are classified as present or future, legal or equitable, and possessory or non-possessory; each axis has doctrinal consequences.
• Every American propertied interest is subject to the police power, eminent domain, taxation, and the general operation of law. Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922); Penn Central, 438 U.S. 104 (1978).
• The civil-law concept of unitary dominium clarifies by contrast what is distinctive about the common-law estate system, the legal–equitable bifurcation, and the trust.
• Five recurring misconceptions — absolute ownership, possession as ownership, title as ownership, property as physical land, and unlimited property rights — are doctrinally false and must be corrected.
• The conceptual framework of this chapter is the analytical toolkit of the treatise; every subsequent chapter presupposes it.

Chapter 4 turns from the concept of property to its classifications. Having established what property is, the treatise next examines how the law distinguishes real from personal property, tangible from intangible, and how the doctrine of fixtures mediates between the two great categories.

• Wesley N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning (Walter Wheeler Cook ed., 1919).
• A.M. Honoré, Ownership, in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence 107 (A.G. Guest ed., 1961).
• J.E. Penner, The Idea of Property in Law (1997).
• Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (1988).
• Stephen R. Munzer, A Theory of Property (1990).
• Thomas W. Merrill, Property and the Right to Exclude, 77 Neb. L. Rev. 730 (1998).
• Thomas W. Merrill & Henry E. Smith, What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?, 111 Yale L.J. 357 (2001).
• Henry E. Smith, Property as the Law of Things, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 1691 (2012).
• Restatement (First) of Property §§ 1–10 (1936).
• Powell on Real Property (Michael Allan Wolf ed., current ed.).
• Stoebuck & Whitman, The Law of Property (3d ed. 2000).
• Cornelius J. Moynihan & Sheldon F. Kurtz, Introduction to the Law of Real Property (5th ed. 2015).