Law, Emotion and Property Relations

Emotion is inherent in our everyday use and ownership of property. It may drive neighbours to litigate a boundary dispute in the courts, or a first-time buyer to purchase a home that significantly exceeds her budget. It can even be seen in the delight that a child experiences when she is given a gift for her birthday. Despite this, there is relatively little scholarship on the connection between law, emotions and property theory, and this article aims to address that gap in the knowledge. Drawing on the common law tradition, it analyses different social, spatial, and material conceptions of property to explain how emotion may affect property relations, as well as the way that property may cause a person to experience particular feelings, such as anger, sadness, happiness, frustration, envy and jealousy. It argues that emotion and property law cannot be separated easily, and instead, they should be regarded as being mutually constitutive and in an ongoing dialectical relationship. For that reason, this article concludes that more attention must be given to the role of emotion in shaping property relations by lawyers, academics, and policymakers, and how this can be reflected in the design and implementation of law.