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What is the concept of this bundle of sticks/bundle of rights.

joetheplumber wrote:What is the concept of this bundle of sticks/bundle of rights.

That Benthamite school o' thought. Property isn't a unitary thing. You can sell some rights in the bundle but not others, etc.

I think they use the expression a lot in the E&E when discussing easements so here's a stab: owner of a servient estate gives up some right to monopolize his land because he cannot interfere with the dominant estate holder's right to use his land. Dominant estate holder gains a right, or adds a stick in the bundle by gaining permission to use another's land. It's not that complicated really.

Here's an example: You own a piece of property... subsequently you own the surface to the property (stick #1), you own the minerals (stick #2), you own the executive rights to the minerals (stick #3), you own the water rights (stick #4), maybe you own the "air rights" depending on where you are and if they believe in such things (stick #5).

Any of these sticks can be severed from the bundle of sticks and sold individually. All the rights associated with a property are called the 'bundle of sticks'.

Hope this helps, I am not in law school yet but this is the kind of work I do in real life.

Also less concrete than above. A full bundle of sticks/rights, for instance, includes a right to exclude, a right to include, a right to alienate, etc. Each of these rights are what make up the bundle of "property rights."

thanks, those examples helped

real property is like a bundle of sticks. That means you can sell some rights to the property ( either on the property, uses of the property or minerals below ground) while still being the "owner of the property". Or you can think of it as a keg of beer. In the beginning you own all of the beer. As you give some out, you give up the right to enjoy the beer as you please. ( like say, you want to have beer-I-o's for breakfast for the next month, or wash your clothes in a tub of beer). But until all of the beer and keg is gone, you are the owner of the keg.

Typically, when laypeople think of property, they think of things. They think about a car, a video game console, a suit, etc. To a lawyer, property is not these tangible things, but rather the relationship between an individual and those things: a set of rights, which are conceptually and actually separable. When people talk about property rights as a bundle of sticks, they are referring to a different bunch of rights regarding the thing in question.

As people have mentioned, this set of rights with regard to a thing can include the right possess, exclude others from use, destroy and many other rights. The rights (the sticks in a particular bundle) that the law will recognize will sometimes be limited if some sorts of rights with regard to a kind of property might be result in a socially undesirable outcome.

A [homophobic language redacted].

[e] Hm. Interesting censor system! You might imagine the word I used, though.