How's Ownership a "moral concept", BUT NOT a legal concept?

Question

I'm assuming that "moral concept" means concept in morality, ethics? What does it mean for any concept (let alone Ownership) to be moral, but NOT legal? Please explain the sentences in bold at a high school level?

1.4.3 ESTATES IN LAND

A second aspect to the land law logic which must be internalised, and which again is difficult (partly due to terminology), is the idea of estates in land rather than ownership of land. To understand land law it is essential to get rid of the idea of ownership of land. There is no such thing as ‘the owner’ of a piece of land in English and Welsh land law. This does not mean that people are lying when they say they own their land, nor does it mean they are being inaccurate as such. This book will refer to landowners and owners of land. It is not that this term is wrong, it is that is [sic] has no legal definition. There is no legal concept of ownership, although of course there is a moral concept [emphasis added], and indeed the term is used as a shorthand for one or more concepts which do have a legal meaning—such as freeholder, leaseholder, owner of the freehold title, and registered proprietor. To a certain extent, all of these terms means ‘owner’, although not ‘the owner’.

Emma Lees, The Principles of Land Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), page 20.

Answer 1

As the quoted text indicates, it is concerned with the law of England and Wales, and specifically as it relates to ownership of land. The law may be different in other jurisdictions, and it may be different for movable property.

In England, a person does not own land in an absolute sense, or indeed in any single sense of the term. One may be a freeholder, a leaseholder, a titleholder, but these are distinct concepts and involve different rights and obligations. Any of them may be regarded as a kind of ownership. If a person purchases the leasehold on some land, it will be regarded as their property. But a leaseholder is a lessee and their ownership expires after a given amount of time, so their ownership has limitations.

In another sense of ownership, the Crown owns the whole country. This is why in the UK, unlike most states within the USA, if a person owns land they do not own the mineral rights to everything found under it. Oil, gas and gold belong to the Crown.

The author is making the point that there is no unique legal concept of ownership of land in the UK, only a collection of concepts that relate to property rights. So if you ask an English lawyer what it means to own land in the UK, you can expect a long, complicated answer.

By contrast, the moral concept of ownership, though disputed, is more straightforward. It is usually understood to consist of the right to consume, use, rent, sell, or dispose of an item as the owner sees fit. Rights of ownership in this sense are often considered to arise naturally as the product of a person's labour.

Answer 2

Ownership is very much a legal concept. It just isn't an indivisible concept in the common law.

Ownership of property in common law (that is, the law descending from the tradition of England) is not an indivisible concept. Ownership in common law always needs clarification to specify: what rights one has in relation to the thing, the nature of those rights (legal vs. equitable), and the duration of those rights. One might only own a lease to a property. Another might own the legal title. Another might own equitable title. Or one person might have a life estate and another person holds the remainder interest. There are many possible variations.

Civil law, on the other hand, does rely on an abstract and indivisible concept of "ownership."

Answer 3

How’s Ownership a "moral concept" BUT NOT a legal concept?

I think that Emma Lees has drawn a distinction without a difference.

If a person may do what they will with a plot of land, what difference does the label make? If someone may build a house, plant crops, sell the land for value, and then upon death leave it to a devisee of their choosing, then it becomes irrelevant whether the source of these powers is a moral code or a legal code.

The American example is the "reasonable expectation of privacy" for purposes of deciding whether 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to a given search. The answer to the question arises in the reasonable expectations of someone in daily life, not from codified law.

So far as I know, there is no written law that says that there is no reasonable expectation that one's garbage is private, nor that one's conversations within a phone booth are indeed private. Yet, based on the uncodified behavior of people, that is how the U.S. Supreme Court has held.

The same considerations about reasonable expectations of privacy can form the basis of civil suits, as well.

Answer 4

There's a technical/philosophical distinction here. Ownership carries the implication of removal: that we can take what is owned with us, or at very least destroy it when we're done with it. If I 'own' a jacket, it means I can carry it from place to place, store it in a closet for later, or toss it in a fire if I choose. Even if I own a house or a factory, I can (theoretically) put it on a flatbed and move it else where, or break it down into parts and sections and reassemble it elsewhere (the way the London Bridge was taken apart and reconstructed in Lake Havasu).

Land itself cannot be moved or destroyed, and so we don't properly 'own' it; we merely retain or possess it for our use until it passes to some other person or entity or is left without anyone claiming it. Legally, ownership is tied to the concept of theft — if someone removes a thing that I own, I have legal grounds to remove it back from them — but we can't steal land the same way we can steal a jacket. To steal a jacket we remove the jacket; to steal land we remove the current possessor. Thus it's more appropriate to say there's a moral concept of land ownership, because taking land is an act committed against the person in possession, not an act on land itself.