This claim implies that the moral underpinnings of property do not eliminate the constitutive role of law or of a law-like set of social norms. By instantiating property rights, law goes beyond protecting people from actual or potential threats that others may pose to their bodily integrity. Property law proactively empowers people, expanding their ability to act and interact in the world.

Making property law means more than identifying a legitimate and substantively appealing conception of property. It also requires answering three further (and somewhat related) questions. First, what are the appropriate institution(s) for creating, interpreting, and developing property law (the institutional question)? Second, to what extent can a legal system that embraces the liberal conception of property also comply with the rule of law? Third, what are the limits (if any) of the authority of property law’s architects?

Imagine a proposal for legal reform aiming to simplify and clarify property law, which recommends the adoption of two simple rules. The first rule prescribes that owners have an in rem right to exclude. The second empowers owners (if more than one) contractually to set up their own governance regime. This bill would obviously be radically incomplete, but is that all that is wrong with it? We could think of convenient additions, but is there anything fundamentally necessary still missing for this bill to constitute at least the core of a property regime in a liberal polity?

My task in this book is to develop a theory of property premised on a conception of autonomy as self-determination or self-authorship, terms that I use interchangeably. In this account, property empowers self-determining individuals to pursue their conception of the good, and this autonomy-enhancing telos legitimizes property and shapes its legal contours. I am not claiming that propertyless individuals cannot be self-determining, but rather that property tends to make an important contribution to personal self-authorship.

A long tradition in Western political thought connects property and liberalism. John Locke is probably the most familiar liberal theorist to give property a place of honor in his account of the state. But Locke, whose property theory is fraught with difficulties, is certainly not the only one. The right to property is often understood as one of the necessary implications of the status of individual natural persons as free and equal, which may explain its inclusion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Liberal property, I argued in Chapter 3, relies on its contribution to owners’ self-determination, which others are obligated to respect. The justification of authorizing owners’ private authority and its coercive enforcement by the state is premised on people’s interpersonal obligation of reciprocal respect for self-determination, making property’s legitimacy contingent on its compliance with this fundamentally liberal understanding of just relationships. Reciprocal respect for self-determination is thus not only a potential external constraint on the liberal conception of property but inherent in its raison d’être.

Property and markets are not fully intertwined. Although one cannot think about the idea of a market without thinking about property – property, after all, is one of the market’s foundational building blocks – it is possible to think about property without thinking about markets. Still, liberal property and markets are so deeply connected that a liberal theory of property cannot ignore the market. A liberal theory of property must explain how property can remain loyal to its liberal commitments in the context of large-scale economies heavily reliant on the operation of markets.

Property leaves very few people indifferent – it usually has either friends or foes. Friends of property tend to celebrate property’s many contributions to our collective, notably economic, goals. They also highlight property’s role as a bulwark of personal independence. Property’s foes are not very impressed. They insist that, for the vast majority of people, property actually generates and perpetuates inequality and dependence. Some critics resist reconstructive efforts and see these grave defects as perpetual, concluding that property needs to be uprooted rather than reformed.