According to the legal rationalist, the law claims to give its subjects reasons for action. The leading legal rationalist, Joseph Raz, says, “the law claims that the existence of legal rules is a reason for conforming behaviour.” Putting the same point more casually, he writes: The law sets things straight: telling people “this is what you should do and whether you agree that this is so or not, now that it is the law that you should you have the law as a new, special kind of reason to do so.” Jules Coleman, who also at times plays the part of the legal rationalist, agrees: The prevalent view among legal positivists today is that law purports to govern conduct as a practical authority. The distinctive feature of law's governance on this view is that it purports to govern by creating reasons for action. Or more succinctly, “Law claims to create reasons for acting.”
A theoretical account of property rights needs to identify what, if anything, is distinctive about property rights as opposed to other sorts of rights; what makes them the sorts of rights that they are. An important and prominent account of the distinctiveness of property rights claims that they are rights to things. I argue against this view: I show that a government-issued licence (to fish or to drive a taxi or to operate a radio station, say) is not a right to a thing but should nevertheless count as a property right. I consider two different arguments for this rights-to-things view: one is based on the Hohfeldian structure of property rights, and one relies on the importance of information costs in the law of property. While each of these arguments teaches us important lessons about property, none can properly support the conclusion that property is rights to things. I suggest that abandoning the rights-to-things view of property can lead to important insights into property theory more generally.Pour expliquer les droits de propriété par le biais de la théorie, il faut identifier ce qui rend ces droits distinctifs par rapport aux autres types de droit. Autrement dit, il faut identifier ce qui les rend le type de droit qu’ils sont. Une démarche importante du caractère distinctif des droits de propriété prétend que ces droits portent sur des biens. Je m’oppose à ce point de vue : je démontre qu’un permis accordé par le gouvernement (par ex. pour pêcher, conduire un taxi ou exploiter un service de radiodiffusion) ne confère pas de droit à un bien mais devrait être considéré comme un droit de propriété tout de même. Je prends en considération deux arguments différents pour élaborer cette idée : le premier se base sur la structure des droits de propriété proposée par Hohfeld, et le deuxième concerne l’importance des coûts d’information. Même si chacun de ces arguments peut nous faire des leçons importantes en matière de la propriété, aucun ne permet de conclure de façon adéquate que les droits de propriété sont des droits à un bien. Je suggère qu’on abandonne la perspective selon laquelle le droit de propriété porte sur des biens; cet abandon peut nous mener à des idées importantes en théorie de la propriété plus généralement
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