Justice

In what sense can someone come to 'own' a piece of land?

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First of all, the question of what grounds private ownership applies to all goods, not just land. So I'm going to treat the question as the more general one about how one can come to own anything. There are two basic approaches to this question: a "natural rights" approach and a "social institution" approach. On the former approach, people have rights to own goods in the same sense in which they have other basic rights, such a right not to have their bodily integrity violated by others. The question for such an approach is how one acquires a property right in any particular good, which amounts to the right to exclusive use of the good and a correlative duty on the part of others to not interfere with the owner's use of the good. The most common answer to this question derives from Locke, and it divides the question into two: how does an unowned good come to be owned by someone, and how can ownership of an already-owned good be rightfully transferred. The answer to the second question is fairly straightforward. If the parties consent to the transfer, and all the usual qualifications about non-coercion, full information, etc. are present, then the ownership transfer is a success. As for the first, the original acquisition question, Locke's idea is that if one "mixed one's labor" with the good - in the case of land, worked the land to grow crops, say - then one's labor on the good gave one a right to own it. Locke included a very famous "proviso", however, to the effect that when one mixes one's labor with land, this yields ownership of the land only if one has left "as much and as good for others". What the import of this proviso is, and whether one should take it seriously, is a matter of much controversy. For a very interesting discussion of Locke's theory and of the proviso in particular, take a look at C. B. Macpherson's The Theory of Possessive Individualism. Another classic discussion, from a libertarian viewpoint, is Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

On the social institution approach, property rights - again, in anything, whether land, small durable goods, or stocks - arise from the legal framework that establishes a society. One has a right to whatever the laws say one has a right to. What makes one's ownership of property just is the justice of the legal/social framework that grounds it. I myself favor this approach. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, is perhaps the most important modern proponent of this idea. Certain important consequences of this approach, especially for the controversial topic of taxation, are developed in Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy, The Myth of Ownership. They argue that to think of taxes as taking away what's yours initially, is to fail to see that without social institutions, which require taxation to exist, there could be no property in the first place. Hence there is nothing sacred about one's right to pre-tax earnings.

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