Abstract
The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly.
Highlights
In the present paper, we confront the question of whether right-libertarians1 must embrace easements by necessity
Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof
We will proceed in the following order: in the first section below we will deal with problems that beset homesteading of the virgin land; we will focus on cases involving landlocked estates; in the last section we will discuss the reason given by Walter Block for limiting easements by necessity exclusively to the cases of homesteading
Summary
We confront the question of whether right-libertarians must embrace easements by necessity. As pointed out by Frank van Dun, even if we admit, as right-libertarians do, that homesteading vests people with the absolute property rights to surround a given person on his estate, it would yet be “absurd to regard their actions as respectful of his freedom, if by refusing him a right of way they turn encirclement into imposed isolation and his property into prison (if he is on his property) or into an inaccessible resource (if he is not).” whether it would be absurd or not obviously depends on the theory of liberty presupposed by right-libertarians. We will proceed in the following order: in the first section below we will deal with problems that beset homesteading of the virgin land; we will focus on cases involving landlocked estates; in the last section we will discuss the reason given by Walter Block for limiting easements by necessity exclusively to the cases of homesteading
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