property
there is no thing called property; there is no thing called a right; there are things, and man kind; a man can establish dominion;
the distinction
man kind use property as the name of a civil right in relation to a thing;
in the 1933 OED, it is written that civil is “of or pertaining to citizens” and “pertaining to the organization and internal affairs of the body politic, or state”; in sense 17 it is written, “Legal as distinguished from natural”; the conclusion is that property as a civil right is an invention;
a right is not a thing; it is the name commonly given to the position of a man to whom a deed or remedy is due by reason of established dominion, agreement, or wrong;
property
a right, title, registration, account, entitlement, or claim written in relation to a thing;
“the permanent right of property, vested in the ancestor himself, was no natural, but merely a civil, right.”
Blackstone, Book II, chapter I, star page 11
dominion
the condition of a man holding in fact, shown by his deeds in respect of a thing;
- possession, use, enjoyment, disposal, exclusion;
Blackstone’s account ties dominion or property to a man’s possession or occupation, use, enjoyment, disposal, and exclusion;
source synthesis: Book I, chapter I; Book II, chapters I and XXVproperty is not observable; dominion is factual and observable;
dominion establishes the boundary; agreement makes a deed due; interference may constitute wrong; established wrong makes remedy due;
Blackstone looked behind the parchment
William Blackstone placed property among rights; in Book I, chapter I of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, he described its present modifications, conservation, and transfer as matters “entirely derived from society” and as “civil advantages”;
in Book II, chapter I, he wrote of “rights of dominion, or property” and “the right of property”, then looked behind the title:
“there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land”;
the “all-bountiful Creator gave to man ‘dominion over all the earth’”; “This is the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion over external things”;
“occupancy is the thing by which the title was in fact originally gained”;
Blackstone continued that each man seized such spots as he found agreeable, “provided he found them unoccupied by any one else”; in the following paragraph he wrote that property remained until a man did an act showing “an intention to abandon it”;
Blackstone also wrote that the original of private property was “probably founded in nature” and called the earth “the general property of all mankind”;
Blackstone wrote the words above and cited Genesis 1:28; they are quoted in modern spelling from the 1893 Sharswood edition. Read the source record: Book I, chapter I, star pages 134–139; Book II, chapter I, star pages 1–10; Sharswood edition; 1766 first-edition Book II scan;
the conclusion drawn here
property and right are inventions by man kind; neither can be seen; a man has dominion where he possesses, uses, enjoys, disposes of, and excludes in respect of a thing, free of control, diminution, or interference by another man;
this separation of the written right from the man, the thing, and the deeds is the conclusion drawn here, not a conclusion written by Blackstone;
paper may be evidence of dominion, but it can not hold or pass or transfer dominion to another man;
ask what is true
a man may use a register, title, account, policy, licence, or other paper to record a claim or evidence a deed; paper is a record, nothing more;
where a man takes control by force, deceit, coercion, or without abandonment, there is no clean change of dominion; he does wrong; passage of time alone is not abandonment and does not make that wrong a clean change of dominion;
wrong is against dominion
the wrong is not that an invisible right was breached; the wrong is the deed by a man that interferes with the dominion of another man without agreement or lawful excuse, or the withholding by a man of a deed due through agreement, undertaking, or prior wrong;
a man can obscure the deed with rights language; by asking about dominion, a man keeps each man, the deed, the interference, and the remedy in view;
