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;
parchment does not convey the dominion of land
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”; at star page 2 he described “the right of property”:
“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”
Blackstone used “right of property” and “dominion” together; in the next sentence he wrote that very few consider “the original and foundation of this right”; he 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 supposed royal grant
in Book II, chapter IV, Blackstone called the following claim “in reality a mere fiction”: that the King originally owned all English land, and that every man’s holding came, directly or through others, from a grant by the King; he expressly stated that “the fact was indeed far otherwise”;
his subject was the supposed original royal grant underlying feudal tenure; he was describing the foundation assumed by those who adopted that system;
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II (first published 1766), chapter IV, star page 51; read page 51 below; read the chapter;
the foundational proposition of universal royal proprietorship is a fiction.
Locke traced property to labour
in chapter V, “Of Property”, section 26 of Two Treatises of Government, John Locke wrote:
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a “property” in his own “person.” This nobody has any right to but himself. The “labour” of his body and the “work” of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this “labour” being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
The quotation above follows the supplied prepared electronic text: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Essay Two, chapter V, “Of Property”, section 26, displayed page 116. Rod Hay prepared that text from The Works of John Locke, new edition, corrected, volume V (London, 1823); the section and page numbering are specific to that prepared text;
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 or Locke;
paper may be evidence of dominion, but it can not hold or pass or transfer dominion to another man;
the transfer of things
where man kind agree that dominion is to change, the observable mechanism is:
- a man possesses or controls the thing;
- man kind agree the deed due;
- the first man yields possession or control and another man takes it;
- the other man’s deeds show possession, use, enjoyment, disposal, and exclusion;
the thing remains a thing; no invisible property passes between man kind; the observable deeds and dominion change;
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;
a transfer in reality
in a sale, gift, exchange, or by compensation, the man who holds the thing chooses the man who will take it, then voluntarily and absolutely abandons it; once abandoned, his dominion ends; the other man seizes the thing to his use, and dominion begins in him; one stops and another begins; man b can compensate man a for improvements to his land, but man b does not buy the land, and no invisible transfer occurs;
the wishes expressed by a man before he dies do not transfer the thing or dominion; neither does a will written on paper; once the man dies, his dominion is lost; if no other man then exercises dominion over the thing, it is left abandoned; that condition is not a deed by the man who died; another man may then seize the thing to his use, and dominion begins in that man; no transfer occurs;
possible use: this may be why a man gives a large family house or land to his eldest son before he dies: if the first man abandons it while living and the son takes possession and control, one man’s dominion ends and another’s begins in that split moment;
the legal version: vesting to the Corporation Sole
in the OED, vesting, verbal noun, sense 1, is “The action or fact of investing, confirming, or establishing, esp. by legal process”; fictitious, adjective, in sense 4 describes what is feigned to exist or imaginary; in sense 6, it is “Constituted or regarded as such by a (legal or conventional) fiction”;
sourcein section 180 of the Law of Property Act 1925, man kind wrote that, unless and until otherwise disposed of by the corporation, property vested in a corporation sole, including the Crown, shall “pass and devolve to and vest in” successors from time to time of that corporation;
as one specific example, in section 2 of the Dawat-e-Hadiyah Act 1993, man kind wrote that the person holding the office “shall be a corporation sole by the name of the Dai al-Mutlaq”; under “Vesting of property”, in section 4 man kind wrote that the specified property, rights, liabilities, and obligations “are without further assurance hereby transferred to the Dai al-Mutlaq”;
the written mechanismman kind write in the legal record that property is transferred to, or vested in, the Corporation Sole;
conclusion drawn hereno thing passes from reality into fiction; man kind merely attribute ownership of the thing, in the legal record, to an imaginary owner;
Blackstone: Book II, chapter IV, page 51 — full text
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II, first edition (Oxford, 1766), chapter IV, “Of the Feodal System”, page 51; body text and footnotes from the Yale Avalon transcription; historical spelling retained, with long-s lettering rendered as s and repeated quotation marks at line beginnings omitted;
In consequence of this change, it became a fundamental maxim and necessary principle (though in reality a mere fiction) of our English tenures, “that the king is the universal lord and original proprietor of all the lands in his kingdom; and that no man doth or can possess any part of it, but what has mediately or immediately been derived as a gift from him, to be held upon feodal services.” For, this being the real case in pure, original, proper feuds, other nations who adopted this system were obliged to act upon the same supposition, as a substruction and foundation of their new polity, though the fact was indeed far otherwise.
And indeed by thus consenting to the introduction of feodal tenures, our English ancestors probably meant no more than to put the kingdom in a state of defence by establishing a military system; and to oblige themselves (in respect of their lands) to maintain the king’s title and territories, with equal vigour and fealty, as if they had received their lands from his bounty upon these express conditions, as pure, proper, beneficiary feudatories.
But, whatever their meaning was, the Norman interpreters, skilled in all the niceties of the feodal constitutions, and well understanding the import and extent of the feodal terms, gave a very different construction to this preceeding; and thereupon took a handle to introduce not only the rigorous doctrines which prevailed in the duchy of Normandy, but also such fruits and dependencies, such hardships and services, as were never known to other nations z; as if the English had in fact, as well as theory, owed every thing they had to the bounty of their sovereign lord.
Our ancestors therefore, who were by no means beneficiaries, but had barely consented to this fiction of tenure from the crown, as the basis of a military discipline, with reason looked upon these deductions as grievous impositions, and arbitrary conclusions from principles that, as to them, had no foundation in truth a. However, this king, and his son William Rufus, kept up with
page 51 ends mid-sentence; the sentence continues on page 52 of the same chapter;
