This Article aims to elucidate servitisation through the lens of Hegel’s personality theory, which justifies property based on its role in shaping our identity. The growing prominence of servitisation enables us to interact with and derive benefits from things not only through ownership but also through contractual access. In this light, it is submitted that the personality justification offers a helpful theoretical framework to inform a clearer conception of servitisation, which in turn sheds illuminating light on its effective legal shaping and regulation. Through the lens of personality theory, I argue that long-term servitisation is functionally equivalent to formal property in promoting the actualisation of personhood, while the short-term counterpart supports the experimentation of personality. The relational nature of Hegelian property is reinforced in servitisation. Accordingly, a functional approach to property lends itself to the proper regulation of servitisation, where contracts could be employed to set out the governance framework for servitised property. Legal regulation on servitisation should play both protective and facilitative roles in the servitised economy.

According to the “Inadequacy Thesis”, the law's refusal to extend the tort of conversion to interferences with contractual rights is evidence of systemic ossification and proof of its failure to protect the most valuable asset class in the modern economy. Whilst it is true that, like chattels, the benefit of contractual rights can be usurped by third parties, transforming such rights into objects of property is the wrong solution to the problem. This article departs from previous analyses by stressing that the analogue of acts of interference with contractual rights is not the conversion of a chattel but a “triangle dispute”. The problem raised by triangle disputes is not how to reach the primary wrongdoer, but how to allocate the loss between the innocent parties. Invoking the concept of “property” cannot solve this problem. Its efficient solution is to be found in better contracts, not more property.

It has partly been assumed that the constitutional obligation to pay compensation for expropriations is to blame for the slow pace at which land has been redistributed in South Africa. However, this assumption requires careful analysis and reflection, with reference to the imperfections of the policies and laws that set out to address landlessness, as well as the underlying theoretical approach to economic justice. This article questions the purpose for which land reform beneficiaries acquire land, with reference to the role that property should ideally fulfil for the landless. The article makes a number of observations to cast light on why the redistribution of land has been alarmingly slow, where inconsistencies and loopholes exist in the programme, and whether expropriations for nil compensation will make any difference in remedying existing failures in the redistribution programme.

The current law in England and Wales adopts a no-property approach to cadavers and separated bodily parts; paradoxically, it affords proprietary protection to tissue users at the expense of tissue sources. Non-proprietary frameworks hardly offer effective legal redress to tissue sources. Potentially, the law could offer tissue sources a mix of proprietary and non-proprietary remedies. Drawing from the work of the famous anthropologist, Marilyn Strathern, I argue that such a flexible and eclectic approach might be facilitated by the concept of duplex, an analytical tool that promotes divergent thinking and paradoxical conceptions of a given issue. I argue that while the no-property rule reflects a duplex on bodily parts, the duplex is narrow and ought to be conceptualised more broadly to cover the claims of tissue sources.

This article argues that public property rights should be recognised as a separate category of property interest, different and distinct from private and common property interests and conferring distinctive rights and obligations on both “owners” and members of the public. It develops a taxonomy to differentiate private, public and common property rights. The article concludes that it is a mistake to think in terms of “private property”, “common property” or “public property”. The division and allocation of resource entitlements in land can result in private, common and public property rights subsisting over the same land simultaneously, in different combinations and at different times. The categorisation of property interests in land (as private, common or public) may also shift and change from time to time. The article considers the importance of distinguishing between private, common and public property interests for developing new strategies for environmental governance, and for implementing the effective protection of natural resources.