PS: Political Science & Politics
American Republican Property and Its Global Constitutional Legacy: The Enduring Politics of Fiduciary Ownership
2026-07-09
The republican conception of property developed during the American founding continues to shape contemporary legal and constitutional orders, yet its foundations and legacy remain underappreciated. This article reconstructs that tradition by showing that American republicanism understood property as a politically constituted, fiduciary entitlement oriented to public purposes. On this view, property emerges as a civil right grounded in the social compact rather than as an inherent natural right conferring absolute dominion. The article traces the nineteenth-century consolidation of an absolutist, Blackstonian conception of property and contract that, under the influence of legal formalism, increasingly depoliticized both. It further shows how legal realism and North American institutional economics disrupted this framework by recasting property as a socially constructed bundle of rights. Recovering the earlier fiduciary-republican conception, the article demonstrates its enduring normative and doctrinal significance in contemporary constitutionalism worldwide, including in eminent domain, as embedded in the social function of the property clause, and in the decommodification of labor.