8.1 Basic Concept of Property

In ordinary language, "property" means a thing — a house, a plot of land, a motorbike. Jurisprudence corrects this: property is not a thing but a right over things — a set of legal relations between persons with respect to things. When a farmer "owns" land in the Terai, the soil itself is not the property; his property is the bundle of legal powers over that soil: to use, to exclude, to income, to transfer. This conceptual correction — from res (thing) to jus in re (right in a thing) — is the foundation of this unit and of the entire Property Law paper. Definitions to master: Austin: property is "a right, unlimited in point of disposition, over a determinate thing" — the widest right of dominion. Salmond: corporeal property consists of "rights in rem over material things"; property in its wider sense embraces all a person's rights in rem, whether over material things (land, goods) or immaterial objects (copyright, goodwill). Bentham: property is "nothing but the basis of expectation" — the legally guaranteed belief that one will derive advantages from a thing. Three conceptual points: Property is a bundle of rights. Ownership is conventionally decomposed into usus (use), usus fructus (fruits/income), abusus (consumption/destruction/transfer) — and modernly into the "bundle of sticks": possession, use, management, income, capital (transfer), security (pledging),…