reason why that duty, owed by A to B, need have any effect on the question of whether X has a duty to B (as well as to A) not to physically interfere with A’s thing.

3. Conclusion

This chapter does not purport to provide a complete Hohfeldian analysis of the nature of property rights. We have concentrated on the distinctive claim-rights held by A, a party with a property right, against the rest of the world. We have not examined the particular duties and liabilities which A may be under in relation to the property; nor have we considered the possible powers that A may hold as part of his property right. Nonetheless, even this partial analysis provides a useful insight: a Hohfeldian analysis of the distinctive claim-rights held by A can be used to support not the view that property consists of an atomized bundle of rights, but rather the contrasting view that a property right is a coherent whole, defined around the concept of a general prima facie duty of the rest of the world not to physically interfere with a physical thing. In this way, the chapter supports Smith’s claim that property law is distinctively ‘modular’ or ‘lumpy’. If we accept that any individual property right has this coherence, we then need to ask if property law as a whole is similarly unified. In particular, if B’s right does not impose the characteristic general duty of non-interference with a physical thing, is that right merely beyond the core of property law, or should it instead be seen as conceptually non-proprietary? It has often, and accurately, been said that Hohfeld made no sustained attempt to differentiate property rights from other multital rights, but we can nonetheless be drawn back to his en passant comment that multital rights can be distinguished on the basis that ‘some rights in rem, or multital rights, relate fairly directly to physical objects; some fairly directly to persons; and some fairly directly neither to tangible objects nor to persons’.109 It may be that, as the distinctive features of a property right depend on the existence of duties not to interfere with a physical thing, the coherence of property law depends on its limitation to that first category of multital rights.

109 Hohfeld 1919, 86.