Property: A German Misunderstanding
| German legal tradition assumes it knows what property is. But behind a definition that has stood unchanged in the Civil Code since 1900, the concept has travelled a very long way. In a recent legal column in Merkur, our Director Marietta Auer argues that the concept has slipped, almost unnoticed, out of private law and into public law. Her key points: since Weimar the courts have stretched the constitutional property guarantee to cover every asset-like claim, up to and including entitlements from the statutory pension insurance, so that property is now defined by its subsistence function rather than by the thing owned. In practice, Article 14 of the Basic Law no longer protects private property against the state, but rather state-allocated benefits against any reduction of the state. |