The Case for an Inclusive Human Right to Property: Social Importance and Individual Self-Realization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a historical and analytical approach, this paper explores the dual nature of the human right to property, which is protected in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). I argue that to approach property as a mere individual and negative right—the dominant view in Western legal practice—leads to obscuring the social dimension of property, which has been repeatedly affirmed in legal, political, and economic theory, as well as in historical practice. The contemporary omission of this social function in legal discourses tends to undermine the fulfillment of core needs of the community through property, which is in tension with individual and exclusionary rights of ownership. I argue property has been a tool of political and economic domination throughout several historical events, such as agricultural land enclosures, colonialism, and industrialisation—property for power—that progressively silenced the social function of property—property for use.\nRather than confirming this trend, human rights law should frame property as a means to achieve positive freedom by acknowledging the dual nature of property and asserting that only property for use should be viewed as a human right. Canadian Scholar John P. Humphrey had suggested this during the drafting process of the UDHR to incorporate the notion of “personal property,” which is limited to ownership of such things that ensure subsistence, self-realization, and agency. This paper argues that the right to property, defined as a social right, can have a broader reach than a limited Western conception of property.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.101 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".