Property as a Bundle of Rights

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Description

By Hartmut Zückert:

"Ostrom and Schlager differentiated between various bundles of property rights and their holders, namely

1) authorized users, whose rights are limited to access and withdrawal of resources;

2) claimants, who can also exclude others;

3) proprietors, who have additional management rights; and

4) owners, who also have the right of alienation, i.e. to sell the resource. The stronger the bundle of rights, the less danger to the existence of the common pool resources, they postulated (Schlager/Ostrom 1992).

The concept of property as a bundle of rights permits us to create a hierarchy of the rights of authorized users, claimants, proprietors and owners. We can derive a typology by means of a comparative analysis of cases of common property management around the world, or by looking at the historical commons, as to which forms of management and which constitutions relating to property rights enabled them to survive for centuries."

(http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/commons-%E2%80%93-historical-concept-property-rights?)


2. Gus Dizerega:

"The economist Harold Demsetz emphasized what we call ‘property’ is not a discrete thing, but rather a bundle of divisible rights that can vary from bundle to bundle (Demsetz 1967). Each element of the bundle defined a legal relationship into which the owner could enter, either with another or with the property itself. When I rent a house, the landlord gives up some rights associated with home ownership so long as the rental contract exists. To give another example, if I live out in the country, I will have more rights to make noise than if I live in an apartment complex, such as the right to play loud music late at night. In both cases I own ‘land,’ but what I actually own are somewhat different bundles of rights with respect to it. When a right in one bundle appears to trespass the rights held within another, a legal system is required to adjudicate the dispute. I do not own land or a car or an animal, but rather a number of rights and corresponding obligations with respect to it. Property rights are inextricably connected to moral and ethical issues: what kinds of relationships are appropriate for people to engage in? Property rights define a field of appropriate relationships into which their owners can enter. At one time, in America, owning human beings was an acceptable property relationship. Today it is not. That property right no longer exists. Few miss it today, though at one time hundreds of thousands fought and died in its defense. Most people would say this change marked an important moral advance over previous millennia when enslaving others was rarely questioned."

(https://cosmosandtaxis.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/dizerega_ct_vol8_iss10_11.pdf)