Book Symposium on Hanoch Dagan ‘A Liberal Theory of Property’ (CUP 2021)

Abstract

We are delighted to gather here, in this special edition of KLJ, fi ve papers which re fl ect on one of the most important books in the recent crop on theory of private law. The reviews and the authors ’ response highlight different aspects of this original and thought-provoking text. Dagan starts off from the crucial insight that property enhances autonomy for many people, but not for all. Because it both empowers and disables, property requires constant vigilance. His main thesis is therefore that a genuinely liberal property law meets this legitimacy challenge by expanding people ’ s oppor-tunities for individual and collective self-determination, while at the same time carefully restricting their options of domination over others. Liberal property empowers self-determining individuals to pursue their conception of the good. While property is not the most fundamental precondition of personal self-determination, it nonetheless has a distinctive role in empowering people. It provides them with some temporally extended control over tangible and intangible resources, which they need in order to carry out their projects and advance their plans. It is this autonomy-enhancing telos that legitimizes property and shapes, or at least should shape, its legal contours in a liberal polity. does not deny that property systems assign private authority over resources in numerous different ways or that not every system of private property can plausibly be interpreted as guided by the liberal commitment to individual self-determination. But he insists that the heavy legitimacy burden that haunts property implies that for owners ’ private authority to be justi fi ed, property must both rely upon and be guided by its