The Structure of Rights in the

Some rights to resources adhere to individuals on the basis of ascribed characteristics—these are rights of person. These rights are not subject to voluntary alienation. And there are rights that adhere to specific characteristics of resources and are subject to alienation. These are rights in property. However, there has been a systematic tendency to promote property rights at the expense of the rights of person and, in so doing, confound the analysis of the commons, of common property, and of private property. Given a delineation of fundamental concepts, this paper examines critically the foundational works of Demsetz and Coase and shows that their theoretical arguments depend on an implicit denial of all rights of person. It is shown, however, that rights of person are not properly analyzable by the standards that apply to rights in property and that the optimal policy to pursue in contemporary society is to determine a desired con-figuration rights and responsibilities in combination with rights in property. INTRODUCTION There can hardly be any word more fraught with meaning than "property." The linguistic history of this term indicates that its current connotation developed rather recently, during the period of an ascendant mercantile and industrial capitalism. Its basic and original meaning had been in reference to a characteristic of a person, so that when first applied to land during the 1700s, it was understood that property in land was indicative of the social position of the individual who owned it. On this basis, it was quite natural for "property" to be ascribed later to productive capital and industrial plant as those possessions became the more essential indicators of social position. ___________________________________________________________________ * Direct all correspondence to: Duran Bell, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-5100, Journal of Socio-Economics, Volume 24, No. 4, pp. Copyright © 1995 JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.