Leif Wenar. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Editor: Maryanne Cline Horowitz. Volume 5. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.
“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or 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” (p. 2). So wrote Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), the great English jurist, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. Blackstone exaggerated: romantic love, sexual desire, and spiritual purity engage human creative attention as much as ownership of things. Yet Blackstone does not overstate the importance of property among human institutions. Property joins the family, the state, and the church as the most basic and universal structures of human society; and among these four, it is likely the most indispensable. A society might persist without kinship, kings, or priests, but it will not survive without distributing to its members stable control over its resources.
The significance of property can be appreciated by considering whether there is anything around you that is not owned by someone. This book, certainly (although the owner of the paper and ink—or the computer screen—will not be the same person as the copyright holder). The chair in which you are sitting and all of the objects around you, the walls of the room, the surrounding building and the land on which it rests. Even the mineral deposits deep below and the airspace high above are owned by someone. Human beings themselves might be exceptions to this universal rule of ownership—although many think that there is a sense in which each person owns himself. And perhaps no one now owns the heavens. Yet if it is true that no one owns the planets and the stars, one feels that this is merely because humans have not reached them yet.
The Nature of Property
What is property? One will search in vain for its essence. Modern ideas of property are the product of millennia of change, their boundaries being stretched and cut to fit a long series of ideologies and social forms. One is left not with one definition of the term but rather with a variety of usages, some overlapping and some aloof. The sadistic boss uses the language of property when he says to the employee, “I own you,” as does the plaintive lover who cries, “You belong to me.”
The variety of meanings of the term may be demonstrated by considering cases in which it is not certain whether something is property or not. Is one’s passport one’s property? What of one’s vote, one’s entitlement to social security payments, or one’s lungs? Do people own their appearance, or their reputation? People will disagree on these cases; most will say that there is a “sense in which” each is property. This is the point that is being emphasized here. There are many “senses” of property, each of them attracting us with its own gravitational pull.
The American legal theorist Thomas Grey has alleged that the dispersal of meanings has gone so far that it should be said that the concept of property has disintegrated completely. Not only are there a range of concepts in ordinary speech, but specialists such as lawyers and economists have defined their own discontinuous usages. Grey’s thesis goes too far. There is a core of meaning to the idea of property, and at this core is found a prototype against which all other instances are measured.
The vital first insight into the nature of property distinguishes property from mere physical possession. Being in contact with an object is neither necessary nor sufficient for ownership. As the English jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) observed: “A piece of stuff which is actually in the Indies may belong to me while the dress I wear may not” (p. 133). The ownership relation is not a physical relation between a person and the property, but a moral or legal relation among persons with respect to the property. Property is to possession as marriage is to mating.
As Bentham asserted, the relation of ownership is not material but metaphysical. What then is that relation? In all instances of ownership there are three variables: some owner has certain rights over the property that is owned.
Any number of entities can fill in the third, property, variable. Houses, steel factories, palaces, oil deposits, and interplanetary-exploration vehicles can all be property, as can taxi medallions, dividends, parts of the broadcast spectrum, works of fiction, and even forms of life themselves. The things that are property have almost infinite variety.
The types of owners of property sort themselves into familiar categories. The public owns public property, the government owns government property, and private persons—either individuals or “artificial” persons such as corporations—own private property. There are also sometimes special rules for certain kinds of owners: for example, couples share rights over joint property, and in some countries church property is exempt from tax. Since the past five hundred years have seen the torturous rise of private property to predominance, private property will be the particular focus here.
It is the rights that define the relation between owner and owned that distinguish the different senses of “property” from each other. The most basic rights that define most kinds of ownership are the rights of exclusive use. An owner has the right to use the property, and others may not use that property without the owner’s permission. Beyond these rights of exclusive use, there are other rights that define various senses of “property” related either to the owner’s control or to the property’s value. An owner may have the right to transfer the property (if so, the property is alienable). An owner may have the right to sell the property (if so, the property is a commodity). An owner may have the right to receive a stream of income from the property (if so, the property is an asset).
These categories nest or overlap. Not everything that an owner may exclusively use may be transferred: one may not legally transfer one’s prescription drugs to anyone else. Not everything that can be transferred may be sold: for example, United States law allows the transfer, but not the sale, of eagle feathers. Nor is everything with economic value something that the owner has the right to sell. Trust funds and tenured professorships are assets, but they are assets that cannot be sold.
The core meaning of property is that of a commodity: that is, of an object of salable rights of exclusive use. The commodity is the prototype of property, and sets the paradigm against which we measure less central senses of ownership. There is a “sense in which” one’s lungs are one’s property, since one has exclusive rights to use them. Yet there is also a sense in which they are not, since one cannot legally sell them to others. Similarly with one’s reputation. One’s reputation can be a financial asset, but there is little sense in saying that one has rights to exclusive use of it. Reputation can be considered a type of property, but its distance from the prototype makes it property of a particularly attenuated sort. The commodity is at the core of current ideas about property, and, as will be seen, debates over what should be put into this crucial category have been some of the most heated.
There are also secondary rights and liabilities that accompany ownership in most of its senses. An owner has a right to compensation should another damage his property, and an owner is liable should her property cause harm to someone else. These secondary aspects of ownership tend to be taken for granted, yet they can be of the first importance for innovative approaches to property-related problems such as environmental protection.
Global Variation and Convergence
When people discuss global variations in property, they are usually speaking either about differences in how property is distributed, or about differences in how property rules are formulated.
Inequality
The question of the distribution of property is the question of inequality. There is no one factor that explains why some countries have more equal property distributions than others, as can be seen by taking income as the representative measure for all property. Some of the most egalitarian countries in the world (such as Hungary and Slovakia) have a tradition of equality that has persisted throughout large transformations in their political and economic systems. Other countries, for example those in Scandinavia, achieved greater equality through determined political reform. The most remarkable decline in inequality in the twentieth century was accomplished in socialist Cuba, which under Fidel Castro, who came to power in 1959, leveled its property holdings to a degree unparalleled in the Americas.
Among the major economic powers, Japan has the most equal distribution of income and the United States the most unequal. Inequality increased in the United States during the period of conservative ascendancy that began in the 1970s, and this growth of inequality appears to be related to a general strengthening of property laws. Latin America, dominated by entrenched landowning elites, is the most consistently unequal region of the world. Many African countries, struggling with failed governments, are also highly unequal in their distributions of property—as is South Africa, which in the early twenty-first century was only slowly recovering from decades of apartheid. Several nations in Southeast Asia are marked by inequality that runs along ethnic lines, with the greater riches of minority ethnic Chinese communities being a perennial source of social friction.
Finally, the world itself is a very unequal place. The level of inequality across the globe is greater even than the inequality within the most unequal large country (Brazil). According to the economist Branko Milanovic the richest 10 percent of individuals in the world control fifty times more of global income than do the poorest 10 percent of individuals, and the richest 1 percent of humankind receives more income in a year than does the poorest 50 percent. There are lively debates over whether this global inequality is increasing or decreasing, and over the impact of globalization on inequality. The only safe conclusion to be drawn from these debates is that different conclusions about trends and impacts will be reached depending on the data that are used and the income brackets that are compared.
The distribution of property has a profound influence on almost all aspects of human life. One window into this conclusion is the robust causal connection between levels of inequality and human health. There are reliable data from within the wealthiest countries showing the influence of inequality on health outcomes. In all rich countries, the rich are much healthier than the poor. Moreover, the more unequal a country is in its property distribution, the more unequal it will be in the distribution of health. Interestingly, “middle” groups in rich countries with high inequality are less healthy than middle groups in rich countries with low inequality. Moreover, creating a more equal distribution of property makes the poor healthier without making the rich less healthy. When considering the global correlation between inequality and health, it is evident that the citizens of rich countries are on average much healthier than the citizens of poor countries. Further, as the medical anthropologist Paul Farmer has shown, poor individuals are much less healthy than rich individuals wherever they live. Regardless of where in the world they live, the poor tend to die younger from infectious diseases and violence, while the rich tend to die older from chronic conditions.
Property rules: capitalism
Beyond the question of the distribution of property is the question of global variations in how property rules are formulated. Looking at the world as a whole, by far the most important change in political economy since World War II is the transition to the near-universal acceptance of the legitimacy of private property in the means of production. This is a tremendous intellectual shift. The contrast between communist and capitalist countries, which defined half a century of world history, has vanished in most places and is vanishing in the rest. Even the Chinese constitution in the early 2000s requires that the right of private property be secured. The fates of the many millions of people who have made (and are making) the transition from a communist to a capitalist economy have been varied. On the one hand, the rapid privatization of state property in the former Soviet Union has been accompanied by a plunge in living standards to levels that are shocking within Europe. On the other hand, the gradual introduction of private property norms into the Chinese economy since the late 1970s has resulted in what is probably the greatest aggregate increase in well-being in human history.
The explanations for this remarkable global convergence on the legitimacy of private property in the means of production cluster around two poles: the political and the economic. Private property is associated with certain kinds of individual political freedom. One type of explanation for the transition to capitalism, emphasized by the historian Richard Pipes, is that the central control characteristic of communist states became intolerable to those wishing more individual control over the politics and less political intrusion into private life. The other cluster of explanations is economic. Communism is simply less efficient than is capitalism at generating the goods and services that people want. The leading theorist of the inefficiency of communist economies was the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek (1899-1992). Hayek’s central insight was that the information about how and what an economy should produce is dispersed among millions of individuals, and that it is much less efficient to attempt to move this information to a central source of economic control (as state ownership systems do) than it is to disperse economic control to the individuals who have the information (as private property systems do).
Property rules: inheritance
Even though private property in the means of production has emerged as the global norm, there are still major variations among countries regarding more specific property rules. One of the most revealing dimensions of variation runs through the laws of inheritance. Inheritance laws are the site of several conflicting values. Parents tend to want to pass their property along to their children, either because this property is special to the family’s history or because the parents wish to increase their children’s economic security. Yet inheritance laws also permit or even require various forms of inequality to persist across generations, the most significant of these being inequalities between families and between genders. The way that a society frames its laws of inheritance reveals much about its social priorities.
The Islamic law of inheritance derives from the pronouncements of the Prophet in the Koran, which have spurred highly elaborated interpretations. All of the schools of interpretation agree that Islamic law requires a daughter to be given part of an inheritance (a very progressive rule in the Prophet’s day), but restricts her share to one-half of what a son receives (which does not satisfy liberals in the early twenty-first century). Also notable in Islamic law are the strict limitation of inheritance to blood relations, and the prohibition on Muslims either bequeathing to or inheriting from those outside the faith. In countries where Islamic law is the basis of national law, one interpretation or another of the Koranic injunctions is codified. In India, on the other hand, the Islamic law of inheritance applies within Muslim communities but not elsewhere. The inability of India to generate a uniform civil code that would bind both the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority (as well as Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs) is a symptom of the deep social differences that continue to divide this vast and sometimes volatile nation.
Among the Tswana tribes of Botswana, the rules of inheritance perpetuate the prevailing economic, familial, and gender relations. Most of the tribes are patrilineal, meaning descent is traced through the males. In these tribes the wealth of the family (mostly cattle) is kept within the family by passing most of it to the eldest son. Interestingly, in some of these tribes the rule is that ownership of the family home passes to the youngest son, thereby ensuring that a widowed mother will be supported even if the eldest son moves away, and so that the traditional family homestead will be preserved. Other Tswana tribes are matrilineal. In these tribes it is still a male who inherits the cattle, but it is the oldest son of the oldest sister, not the son, who receives the main inheritance. Here again is seen the property rules sustaining, and even defining, the most basic social relationships over time.
Primogeniture (which vests ownership of land in the oldest son) is especially rewarding as a subject for investigation, because its presence correlates to important features in a society’s economy. A Marxist thesis states that changes in political and economic rules will tend to follow developments in methods of production: as Karl Marx (1818-1883) himself said, the hand mill gives you society with a feudal lord, the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The history of primogeniture tends to bear out this hypothesis. In the English feudal period arable land was the most productive asset, yet land was limited and required large estates to be worked effectively (to divide it was to ruin it, as the Scottish economist Adam Smith [1723-1790] remarked). Primogeniture ensured that an estate would remain intact, instead of dissipating the land into inefficient smaller parcels by dividing it among sons. These same economic facts also obtained in Japan during the period of domination by the samurai class, and again in Japan primogeniture defined the rules of inheritance. By contrast, primogeniture was never widely adopted in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American law. This can be explained by the much greater availability of arable land in America (reducing the need to require a specific form of inheritance) and the increased importance there of industrial and financial capital (the ownership of which can be divided without similarly reducing productive efficiency).
The form of inheritance laws in a society are not only responsive to epochal trends in methods of production, they are also of first importance for explaining the specific character of that society at any time. For example, at the turn of the twenty-first century blacks in the United States faced far greater risks of poverty, unemployment, and imprisonment than did whites. The sociologist Thomas Shapiro argues in a 2004 book that the main explanation for this is that these blacks inherited much less wealth than did their white counterparts. Because blacks inherited less, their opportunities were fewer and they were less likely to be able to withstand the economic shocks that are a part of life in a modern economy. Moreover, this racial disparity in wealth can be expected to increase over time, as whites build up greater capital between generations at a much faster rate. Different rules of inheritance would produce different patterns of social inequalities between the races.
The Values of Property
As has been seen, the nature of property is complex. The values that bear on property are similarly complex. Indeed as the political theorist Alan Ryan has emphasized, the long history of the debate over the legitimacy of private property can be viewed as a succession of major theorists stressing the benefits or the burdens of this institution. The goods and the bads that these theorists have emphasized can be arranged along three dimensions: the values pertaining to individuals’ relation to private property, the values arising from an owner’s relation to other persons, and the values generated in a society where private property predominates.
Personal values
An owner has many advantages because of his relation to what he owns. As Bentham never tired of pointing out, owning property gives one a secure access to resources that may be essential to carrying out one’s plans over time. Ownership also allows one to enjoy and preserve items of personal value, such as a mother’s wedding ring. A Hegelian point elaborated by the legal theorist Jeremy Waldron is that ownership also improves the owner. As an owner works on his property (for example, paints a picture) his self-awareness increases as he sees his personality reflected in the world, and he comes to develop prudence as he realizes that the changes he makes in his property on one day will determine what he starts work with on the next day.
The critics of private ownership have stressed the corresponding disadvantages. Marxist critics have worried that owners will fetishize what they own and come to believe that ownership of consumer goods can substitute for satisfying personal relationships or deserved self-regard. Nor do Marxists celebrate individuals’ externalizing their personalities into the property on which they work, since in a capitalist system these individuals will have to sell the objects to others in order to make a living. Finally, nearly all critics of private property have made the mirror-image point to Bentham’s concerning the owner’s security. Those who do not own property, they note, can expect to be excluded from what they want and need, which makes their prospects predictably wretched.
Interpersonal values
The interpersonal benefits of private ownership are many. Property secures for an owner a protected sphere in which he is free to do as he likes. He may protect his privacy by keeping others out, and he may increase intimacy by allowing selected others to enter his private zone. Moreover, as Hegel saw, ownership brings with it social recognition: everyone must acknowledge that the owner’s will is decisive over the disposition of the object of ownership. Aristotle also noticed that private ownership increases opportunities for generosity—it would be much harder to give gifts if no one owned anything that could be given.
Yet these benefits also have flip sides. The same rights that bring freedom and privacy can also foster disconnection, loneliness, lack of fellow-feeling, and antisociality. Further, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) bemoaned, private property makes each person dependent on others for not only their material wants but for their very self-conception. In a capitalist system one depends for the satisfaction of one’s needs on others who may have no concern for one’s welfare, and one comes to evaluate one’s self-worth mostly by reference to the property one has accumulated.
Societal values
Finally, the bitterest battles have been over the societal values attaching to a private property system. On the one hand, private ownership is often superior to common ownership for effective stewardship of resources. (“If everyone owns everything, then no one will take care of anything.”) Private property economies encourage each person to work hard to satisfy the wants and needs of others, and so are likely to be more innovative and prosperous. Widespread property ownership is conducive to social stability, since those “with a stake in the society” are less likely to favor revolution or war. And private ownership, as the American economist Milton Friedman (b. 1912) argued, is the best bulwark against the overweening state power that the twentieth century gave so much cause to fear. On the other hand, the pathologies of private ownership systems have been thoroughly documented. Private property economies foster competitive and exploitative relations, in which each sees the other as only a rival or a master, a servant or a dupe. Private property turns intimate relations into commercial relations (as one sees at weddings and Christmas). Markets multiply false needs and a blank consumerism, wasting resources and leading to uncontrolled environmental damage. Furthermore, a private property economy results in inequalities in almost every important aspect of human life, from political power to opportunities for meaningful work and leisure to life expectancy itself.
The complexity of the values surrounding private property has led all modern societies to frame commensurately complex property laws in an effort to capture the benefits of property while avoiding its burdens. For example, the law may allow the owner of a shopping mall to profit from renting space to popular stores but also forbid him to exclude protesters peacefully handing out political pamphlets. The law may allow a homeowner complete freedom of interior decoration but restrict her freedom to paint the exterior in garish colors so as to protect her neighbors’ property values. Private property law in every legal system has become an intricate web of regulations, as each society has struggled to balance all of the countervailing values at stake.
Contemporary Debates
Within the framework presented here, private property rights are instrumental to achieving a variety of diverse values. This is by far the predominant framework among those who devise national and international property rules. Within the academy, however, the period since the early 1970s has seen two alternative paradigms emerge. Both of these paradigms tend toward libertarianism, which models politics as the interactions among private property owners and argues that property rights should be robustly resistant to state interference. Although these two paradigms converge on a libertarian political program, they reach it by quite different routes.
Academic debates: Nozick and law and economics
Robert Nozick’s extraordinary Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) declared that property rights are not instrumental, but are rather morally fundamental. Respect for persons requires, Nozick claims, not only that one respect their rights to life and free movement, but that one respects their rights to their legitimately acquired property as well. A just social order will no more recognize an overall principle for distributing wealth than it will recognize an overall principle for distributing marriage partners. To tax someone’s earnings and give these earnings to someone else is on a par with enslaving that person for someone else’s benefit—it is a fundamental violation of the taxpayer’s rights. The only justifiable state is a minimal one that protects people’s property rights against encroachment; beyond this, individuals must remain free to use and sell their property (including themselves) as they choose.
Nozik here develops and radicalizes the theory of the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who argued that private property rights are conceptually and historically prior to political institutions, and that political power cannot legitimately be used to deprive individuals of the rights they have independently of the existence of the state.
The brilliance of Nozick’s arguments stimulated an entire generation of philosophers to respond to the idea that property rights might be fundamental. Within the legal academy a second movement was also reaching consistently libertarian conclusions, albeit from a different set of assumptions. This movement, known as law and economics, holds that property rights are indeed instrumental, but that they are instrumental in achieving a single value: wealth. There are actually two separate law and economics theses: one is that the laws as they exist do generally work to maximize wealth, and the other is that the laws should work to maximize wealth. The maverick leader of the law and economics movement, Richard Posner, has advanced both theses.
The law is and should be framed, Posner argues, so as to maintain an efficient allocation of resources—meaning an allocation wherein those who are the most willing and able to pay for the various resources have control over those resources. For most resources, the law can achieve an efficient allocation by assigning strong property rights to owners. If someone besides an owner values a resource more than does the owner, they can then simply buy it from that owner. The main role of the state is again simply to enforce these strong property rights. However, there are some cases in which it is more efficient for the law to assign somewhat weaker property rights. For example, if a public use of a resource would bring more wealth than does a private use (building a highway through private ranches, for example), then the state may simply take the resource without entering into expensive negotiations with each private owner.
This wealth-maximizing paradigm has proved a powerful framework for explaining why the law is as it is within capitalist economies. Yet, clearly, even in capitalist economies not all laws work to maximize wealth, and legal economists have advocated a gamut of reforms that they believe would make these economies more efficient. They have generally argued that efficiency would be increased with stronger property rights, a less redistributive state, and, most notoriously, with a wider application of property rules. For example, legal economists have claimed that treating body parts, votes, and even babies as salable property would increase total social wealth. This last argument is one that leads this discussion out of the academy and into the more general public debate over commodification.
Commodification and progressive property-based arguments
The question of commodification is: What should be for sale? Disputes have focused on objects and activities that are particularly sensitive for human identity and contemporary morality: blood, organs, psychoactive drugs, sexual services (prostitution) and gestational labor (surrogate-motherhood contracts). The debates over whether these things should be commodities have had a certain structure. On the procommodification side, it is often said that commodification allows those who want something (sex or a baby) to get what they otherwise could not. Moreover, commodification tends to increase the supply of scarce goods (there would be few waiting lists for organ transplants if there were a market for organs). Many pro-commodification arguments simply assert that restrictions on sales (of, for example, drugs) are insultingly paternalistic restrictions on harmless personal freedom. Some also argue that commodification allows the renegotiation of outdated cultural norms: for example, that legalizing surrogacy would show that women are in control of their own reproductive lives. Moreover, it is hard to limit anti-commodification arguments to their intended targets: Why is it wrong to sell one’s services as a prostitute, but not as a nurse, a cellist, or a priest?
Anti-commodification arguments have revolved around harms to well-being, status, and community cohesiveness. It is said that allowing markets in, for example, organs would inevitably lead to exploitation of the poor and the desperate, and so exacerbate existing social inequalities. Moreover, legalized prostitution and surrogacy only reinforce the stereotypes of women as properly sexually subordinate or as baby factories. More subtly, it is argued that commodifying people’s bodies, or their sexual or reproductive lives, would instill in them a degraded self-image as they came to view themselves as repositories of economic value instead of beings of dignity. Finally, as English social theorist Richard Titmuss found with blood donation, a society that gives gifts instead of making sales fosters the kind of altruism that is crucial for holding a community together.
Anti-commodification arguments have been one standard of the political Left during a period in which the political Right has eliminated everything from state ownership of industry to rent control. The collapse of Marxist ideology, and a new popular presumption against traditional taxation and redistribution schemes, has disrupted leftist politics. Only slowly is the Left learning to deploy property arguments toward progressive causes. One example is in environmental regulation, where it is argued that “dirty” industries should be held liable for the harms (pollution) that their property causes. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, has launched a different kind of progressive-based argument from the Right by claiming that strengthening the property laws in developing countries would allow the many poor who work in the “shadow” economy to take advantage of the resources (houses, land) that they now control but cannot use as legal assets.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property brings together many of the themes from the discussions above: conceptual complexity, global variation and convergence, and lively debates over values. Intellectual property rights are rights to control the use or transmission of intellectual creations. There are three basic categories. Copyright covers “expressive” works (such as books, musical compositions, films, paintings, computer programs) as well as performances, sound recordings, and broadcasts. Patents protect inventions. Trademarks and marks of geographical origin (for example, “Champagne”) make distinctions among the goods and services that are brought to market. The wide historical variation in intellectual property law across the globe narrowed in the 1990s when intellectual property standards (such as that a copyright endures for fifty years after the death of the author, and patent protection lasts for twenty years) were built into the treaties establishing the World Trade Organization.
The origins of copyright law lie in the desire of the English crown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to censor publications by granting printing monopolies to selected publishers; patent monopolies over inventions emerged in Renaissance Italy. In the modern era the main justifications for intellectual property rights have been three. By far the dominant justification (enshrined, for example, in the U.S. Constitution) is that the prospect of exclusive control gives creators incentives to create works that will be pleasing and useful to others. A secondary justification, usually associated with continental Europe, is that intellectual property rights protect the personality interests of artists in the integrity of their expressions. A third justification, relating mostly to trademarks and geographical marks, is that these rights assure consumers by associating a product with known producers.
Global intellectual property law has become extraordinarily elaborate as its framers have tried to balance all of the values at stake. Many disputes remain. For example, many have argued for weakening the patent protection of pharmaceuticals so that sick people in poor countries can get the medicines they need. The pharmaceutical industry has countered that such weakening would lessen the incentives they have to create new life-saving drugs in the future. Another dispute has been over emerging technologies such as the Internet, whose potential, as legal theorist Lawrence Lessig maintains, is shackled by national regulations designed to favor powerful industries.
Given that the fates of millions of lives, the rate of global economic progress, and huge profits drive controversies such as these, it is not surprising that they have moved from the legal into the political arenas. On these issues, as with so many other issues concerning property, the most basic interests and values are at stake.