The Right To Private Property

America's most prominent modern liberal legal theorist was Professor Ronald Dworkin, professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law until his death in 2013. His books, Taking Rights Seriously, Law's Empire and Sovereign Virtue are all serious defenses of the idea, basically, that the Lockean tradition of law and politics which the American Founders had invoked in crafting the Declaration of Independence and, to a lesser extent, the US Constitution, is wrong. As he said in one exchange in the pages of The New York Review of Books (December 6, 2007), the US Supreme Court, in upholding the law in New York State in the famous Lochner decision of 1905 that defended private property rights, "relied consistently on the mistaken but principled view that property rights are basic human rights."

But contrary to Dworkin's assertion, the right to private property is indeed a basic human right. It is fundamental to any bona fide free society. Just consider, as one vital case in point, that unless one has the right to private property, one does not have the right to freedom of speech – it is because of that basic human right that government may not censor what we say and write but may do so when it involves public property, such as radio or television stations that use the public airwaves, or a public park. In fact, all basic individual rights rest, practically, on the right to private property and are threatened by its abrogation.

Some have made the point that property rights had been used to justify slavery but that is sophistry. The only reason that one could plausibly claim to own slaves is that they were falsely, immorally declared not to be full human beings, more akin to domesticated animals than to people. It needed such spurious thinking to get around the fact that human beings have a property right in their own life, their labor and its fruits.

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