The office of ownership revisited

In this article, I revisit the arguments in, and address some concerns about, an earlier article of mine, ‘The Office of Ownership.’ This article makes two main points. The first is about the ways in which a transfer of property from one person to another affects the obligations of third parties. I continue to defend the earlier article’s claim that, by thinking about the obligations owed to owners of property as being owed to ‘the owner,’ rather than to the particular named person who happens to be the owner, we can maintain both the idea that property rights are in rem and the idea that they partake of private law’s distinctive bilateral normativity. The second is about the extent to which the notion of an office is helpful in thinking about ownership. There is reason to doubt that it is, notably because owners’ powers are typically not bounded in the way that office-holders’ powers seem to be. But I argue that, at least some of the time, particularly in contexts where owners are able to exercise powers that bind their successors in title, such as by creating easements, leases, or running covenants, the powers of ownership do seem bounded by their purpose.