Introducing Property Rights

Chapter 11 starts by introducing Part III’s focus on rights that cannot be grounded primarily in the good of the right-holder. Property will be an important example of such a right, even though Chapter 12 allows that some property can be grounded in the right-holder’s good. Beforehand, in Chapter 11, an account is given of the nature of property rights as fundamentally exclusionary: as constituted by duties of non-trespass owed to the owner by all others. In addition, a theory is developed of the nature of money (as an owned item of great modern importance), according to which money is constituted by something that essentially confers Hohfeldian powers. These theories of property and money form the basis for the discussion, in Chapters 12–13, of when property rights are groundable for the sake of the right-holder, and of when they are not.