This book examines the central issue in property theory, as it intersects with law: what property is, as an idea, and the power that claimed individual property rights should have against competing public goals. Drawing upon areas as diverse as land use, the body as property, personal information as property, cultural property, and state redistributive claims, the author shows that there are deep reasons for property's protective power, or lack of it, in these and other cases - reasons that are grounded in the nature of property, as an idea, and in the conflicts of that idea with competing public interests. The author also establishes why the right to property is necessarily different from - and should be less protected than - other constitutional rights.