Equity, Property, and the Ethical Subject

Orthodox ideas of ownership tend to depict property as a private domain that expresses the owner?s formal rights. Yet equity does much to resist this outlook, deploying ethically-loaded ideas such as conscience and articulating an interpersonal and distinctly duty-driven character to property relations. Focusing on English case law, this article suggests that we can gather various strands of equitable property norms, particularly those derived from the constructive trust, around relationships of responsibility and vulnerability. Furthermore, the article asks what such equitable ideas about property might therefore tell us about the purportedly (self-)possessive character of human subjectivity. Rather than constructing people as sovereign, autonomous proprietors, we might read equity as tracing an ethical quality to the way we perceive ourselves and others through property-related ideas.