Property rights and social justice: progressive property in action

Property Rights and Social Justice analyses 'progressive property' in action by examining the role of constitutional property rights guarantees in mediating private ownership and social justice. It combines insights from property theory with enlightening doctrinal analysis of the interaction between property rights and social justice in the constitutional and broader legal context. It does so through the prism of the Irish Constitution's property guarantees, which uniquely in the English-speaking, common law world both protect property rights and requires their regulation by the State to secure social justice. Through this analysis, the book grounds key debates in contemporary property theory in fresh, illuminating doctrinal examples, and enhances global debates about the constitutional protection of property rights. It argues that primacy is perhaps inevitably afforded to political determinations about the appropriate mediation of property rights and social justice, meaning that the political impact of constitutionalisation needs to be disentangled from its strict legal effects.

Progressive property in action : widening the doctrinal lens -- Understanding progressive property : traits, themes and values -- Property as ideology, individual right, and institution -- Engaging constitutional property rights -- Standards of review and the form of constitutional property rights -- Adjudicating fairness : the 'unjust attack' assessment -- Security of possession in a progressive constitutional context -- Security of value in a progressive constitutional context -- 'Progressive property' in action : context, complexity, and the democratic mediation of property rights and social justice. "Property theory spans a wide range of overlapping issues, including addressing private ownership's moral justification, its core features and scope as a matter of private law, and its status as a matter of public law, often without distinguishing sharply between the applicability of the concepts and arguments developed at the level of theory in these various contexts"