Property And The First Restatement Of Property

Property and the First Restatement of Property By Anthony J. Fejfar, B.A., J.D., Esq., Coif © Copyright 2009 by Anthony J. Fejfar In the First Restatement of Property Law, “Property” is defined as, “A legal relationship between persons with respect to some thing tangible or intangible/” Now, the foregoing is a good definition, but admittedly it is a bit circular. Instead, following Bernard Lonergan, it would be better to say, “Property is a meaning relationship between persons with respect to some thing, tangible or intangible.”

Lonergan point out in his

work, that part of the real world is the world of meaning. Meaning is real. Now, some argue for the real as being sense experience, but this is not true. Developmental Psychology tells us that the world of the infant, from birth for the first year, is basically a Chaos world of magical thinking. The world begins to be real for the infant when meaning developes, typically with the use of oral language at age 1. Human being never have sense experience, instead they have intuitive experience which involves the world mediated by meaning. Thus, it is fair to say that law and property are real because they involve real human meaning.