Réhabiliter la propriété comme bundle of rights : des origines à Elinor Ostrom, et au-delà ?

The definition of property in terms of a bundle of rights lies at the heart of a powerful legal doctrine, whose development over the course of the 20th century revolutionized the very conception of property in the United States. Today, this definition is widely accepted by property theorists. Although it continues to be the subject of heated controversy, the idea of property as a bundle of rights has gradually become a new ?orthodoxy? taught in American universities and practiced in courts of justice. However, during its transformation into the new mainstream, the use of this concept has evolved in a very specific direction, such that the right to exclude has become the decisive criterion of property. This has destroyed the very foundations of the concept of property as a bundle of rights, depriving it of its significance as an alternative definition of property. In this article we revisit the origins of this conception of property, in order to put into perspective the use of this approach by the theorist of the commons and Nobel economics prize-winner Elinor Ostrom. Our aim is to explain how the major contribution of Ostrom on property regimes in the domain of natural resources restores the original conception of property as a bundle of rights and gives it back its full significance. The first section deals with the role played by the legal realism school in the emergence of the concept of property as a bundle of rights. We focus our attention on the complementary contributions to the construction of this definition of property of a certain number of jurists and economists who shared the same ?socialized? approach to property, breaking away from the absolutist and exclusivist approach that involves the domination of an individual over a thing. We thus highlight the contributions of the French jurist Léon Duguit, the institutionalist economist John Commons and the American jurist Wesley Hohfeld. The second section explains how the conceptual analysis of property regimes over natural resources, developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleague Edella Schlager, represents a veritable revival of the concept of property rights in direct line with the work of John Commons. We conclude on the possibility of a new evolution in the concept of property as a bundle of rights.