As this week marks the third anniversary of the
Kelo decision, I wanted to point readers to a very important essay, one that I use each year as a launching point for discussion in my class on Property. To read this essay, which is short but powerful, click
Madison's "On Property" here.
The Madison
National Gazette essay focuses on the conception of property broadly -- from our persons, to our land, and to our things.
From the essay:
"In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions. . . . Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."
And a favorite quote from Blackstone:
"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 to the external things of the world, in the total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give themselves the trouble to consider the origin and foundation of this right. Pleased as we may be with the possession, we seem to be afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defects in our title; or at best we rest satisfied with the decision of the laws in our favor, without examining the reason or authority upon which those laws have been built."
William Blackstone, 2 Commentaries on the Law of England 2 (1766).