The classic four (learn with critiques): Labour theory (Locke): ownership earned by mixing labour with nature — the tiller's title; the moral intuition behind homesteading and land-to-the-tiller reforms; critique: the "mixing" metaphor is unclear, and it was historically used to dispossess customary users (the land without Locke's form of labour treated as "waste"); Utilitarian theory (Bentham): property is the law's creation, justified by the security of expectation it produces — "property and law are born together, and die together"; the theory of most modern property legislation (registration systems, limitation, reform); critique: security for whom? — the utility calculus can justify both protection and confiscation; Personality theory (Hegel): property as the external sphere of the will — the person embodied in things; critique: moving for heirlooms, unconvincing for share portfolios; Bundle-of-rights / positivist analysis (Hohfeld; Honoré): property as decomposable legal relations that statute can split and recombine — lease, mortgage, easement as separated sticks of the bundle; the working theory of this entire course.
The theories' Nepali application (the marks-earning paragraph): Nepal's property law is a utilitarian-positivist system with labour-theory pockets (the land-to-the-tiller reforms of the Land Act 2021) and constitutional rebalancing (Article 25's social conditioning) — the theory question is never abstract in Nepal: every land-reform and acquisition statute is a theory debate enacted.
Exam Focus Long questions: (i) The meaning and concept — the three uses, the in rem character, the bundle of rights, the legal-construction point; (ii) The kinds of property — all six classification axes with the Nepali statutory taxonomy; (iii) The theories — each with a leading name and a critique, closed with the Nepali application paragraph. Short questions: in rem vs. in personam; the bundle of rights; ailani jagga; choses in action; hereditary vs. acquired property. Trick areas: (i) Property is the RIGHT, not the thing — the classic examiner's trap; (ii) The bundle can be split by law (lease, mortgage) without destroying ownership — positivism's point against absolutist conceptions; (iii) Incorporeal property is still property — IP and easements are not "exceptions" but full members of the class.