ABSTRACT
Theories of property have contributed enormously to both the creation of modern property law and to its development to the present day. Theories of property have informed and influenced legal practitioners and law teachers for centuries. For this reason, it is important to understand how the theories of property have developed the person/thing paradigm of people-place relations since the time of Locke. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the person-thing model of property relations was rearticulated as a personperson model by eminent scholars. Yet the logic of ‘dephysicalisation’ contained in the person-thing model remained central to the person-person model, thus perpetuating the abstraction and alienation of people-place relations and maintaining the irrelevance of land to property relations. But what, precisely, does dephysicalisation mean?
