ABSTRACT
This chapter explores legal theories that are sympathetic to property obligation. It explains three institutional factors of modern property that singly and cumulatively impede stewardship; abstraction, commoditization and individualism. Many scholars aspire to a property right imbued with an environmental ethic. But defining stewardship through the private lens illustrates the unbridged gulf between aspiration and implementation. The result is that stewardship is articulated as practical and outcomes measured, an essentially extra-property construct. The feudal nature of the Anglo common law and its attendant doctrines of tenure and estates, speak faintly of obligation as an historic consequence of ownership. Personhood also inspired a related theory of 'peoplehood' to explain group ownership of cultural property. The case for obligation to be a 'thing' internal to property is heavily reliant on the assumption that property as a human institution is inherently social and relational. Christopher Rodgers' resource allocation model of property accounts for positive stewardship obligations as property management rules.
