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учебный год 2023 / (Philosophical Foundations of Law) James Penner, Henry Smith-Philosophical Foundations of Property Law-Oxford University Press (2014).pdf
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Property and Necessity

67

extend are cases of necessity in a very different sense than in the cases on which I have focused in this chapter.

6. Is the Right of Necessity a Property Right?

In conclusion I would like to defend the claim I made at the outset of this chapter that one might put the upshot of the account of the private law doctrine of necessity I’ve defended here as holding that the right of necessity is in effect a property right. By this I mean to highlight three elements of that account.

The first is that necessity is on Grotius’s account a property right in the sense that it is not a personal right in the way that, for example, Pufendorf has it. On Pufendorf ’s account, recall, the right of necessity is a right that another use her property in a particular way (i.e. for one’s benefit). On Grotius’s account, by contrast, the right is just a right to use the property. Second, there is a sense in which for Grotius necessity is not a defence. It is just the exercise of a right, under certain limitations, to use a bit of the world. It is like a kind of easement imposed by law.

Finally, in claiming that on this account the right of necessity is a property right I mean to highlight the fact that it anchors the justification of the doctrine of necessity in a view about our relationship to our common world. The world is each of ours, according to Grotius, and there is a sense in which it remains so even if and after we choose to divide it up. This sense limits the ways in which, and degrees to which, we can exclude others from the parts we have claimed as our own.