Joint ownership and alienability

Most legal traditions view individual ownership as paradigmatic. Yet most property is jointly owned. This paper analyzes how joint ownership affects alienability by focusing on two fundamental issues raised by joint ownership—the nature of the class of those who may benefit from a joint asset and the nature of the process for making decisions about such an asset. I identify four possible ways to resolve these issues. These possibilities coincide with the four general approaches by which joint property has been held over time and across legal traditions. This four-fold categorization and the different effect each has on alienability is used to analyze a broad array of laws and practices, ranging from Hindu inheritance law to the Uniform Partnership Act to the growing shareholder democracy movement.