Following Wesley Hohfeld's pioneering analyses, which demonstrated that the “folk” concept of ownership conflated a variety of distinct legal relations, a deflationary “bundle theory” regarding those relations as essentially unconnected held sway for much of the subsequent century. In recent decades, this theory has been thought too diffuse; it seems counterintuitive to insist, for instance, that rights of possession and alienation over a property are associated only contingently. Accordingly, scholars such as James Penner and James Harris have advanced theories that revive the concept of ownership, identifying some instances of property as “paradigmatic,” and regarding others as conceptually subsidiary. I propose a new interpretation of the bundle theory, based on David Lewis's idea of “Humean supervenience” among physical particles. I critically examine the major antibundle positions, arguing that their criticisms result from confusion about the claims of the bundle theory, which remains the best account of property rights available.

This paper argues that neither a general right to exclude migrants nor a general right to migrate freely exists. The extent of the right to exclude or the right to migrate freely must instead, in the majority of cases, be determined indirectly by examining whether a given immigration law or policy would result in the violation of migrants’ basic rights. Therefore states’ right to exclude migrants is constrained by what the author calls the indirect principle of freedom of migration. Under this principle, if an immigration law or policy cannot be imposed without violating a migrant's basic rights, then the law or policy cannot be legitimately implemented. The argument for this principle is undertaken both conceptually and substantively. It is then defended against the objections that on the one hand, it may not have enough critical force, and on the other, it may be overly restrictive of states’ power to exclude migrants.

Egalitarian theories of religious freedom deny that religion is entitled to special treatment in law above and beyond that granted to comparable beliefs and practices. The most detailed and influential defense of such an approach is Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager's Religious Freedom and the Constitution (2007). In this essay I develop, elucidate, and show the limits of the “reductionist” strategy adopted by Eisgruber and Sager. The strategy requires that religion be analogized with other beliefs and practices according to a robust metric of comparison. I argue that Eisgruber and Sager fail to develop a consistent and coherent metric and I further suggest that this failure is symptomatic of the broader difficulty encountered by liberal theory in fitting the concept of religious freedom into a broadly egalitarian framework.