ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book develops and defends an account of justice as property.In this chapter the author hopes to present a plausible alternative to the most prominent views in the property and justice literature: left-libertarianism, rightlibertarianism, Kantian statism, contractualism, and rule-consequentialism. Kantian statism argues that there is no natural right to property; political institutions must be established before property rights have any normative force. Natural justice cannot make as strong or as direct normative demands of the actually existing legal system. It provides a connection between freedom and property that is needed to understand freedom or justice through the lens of property. This chapter argues that natural rights can only stipulate very broad ranges of kinds of property conventions that are demanded by justice, while those conventions must be evaluated distinctly in order to know ultimately how our institutions should look.
