The Joy of Property

Charles Carreon

In my first year at UCLA Law School, a second year student was holding forth on the importance of reducing all legal principles to a few words. The core first-year classes such as Property, Contracts, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure, could each be reduced to a simple declaratory statement. Contracts, he confidently stated, “are made to be broken.” Criminal law reduced to “don't get caught.” Criminal procedure amounted to “don't keep drugs in your car.” Property, he proclaimed had the simplest rule of all: “Own it!” While gales of laughter greeted these declarations, over the past eighteen years, I have remembered his quip any number of times, and particularly with respect to property, his pithy imperative packs a mighty punch of good common sense.


In the state of California, property is described as “everything capable of being owned.” It applies to things as diverse and evanescent as ownership of an Internet domain name and the right to recover damages in a lawsuit that hasn't even been filed. Property is generally divided into two types: real estate and personal property. I'll speak very briefly about real estate, because how you handle real estate should fit into your general business plan. Then we'll move on to discussing personal property, which is quite varied, moving from hardware to software, and on to more abstract rights like ownership of domain names, trademarks, copyrights, and patents. We close out with a discussion on asset protection, insurance, investments and estate planning.