Mine — Examining the Law of Ownership

A baseball fan gets his glove on a record-setting home run ball, loses it in a scrum, and watches a stranger hold it up for the crowd. A homeowner shoots down a drone flying over his backyard. A couple's redwoods grow tall enough to shade a neighbor's solar panels, and the couple ends up with a criminal conviction. Each of these fights is about the same question: what makes something "mine"? The answer is less natural, and far more engineered, than most of us assume.

In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen speaks with Michael Heller, the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School and co-author, with James Salzman, of Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, about the six simple stories people use to claim everything, and how governments, businesses, and courts mix and match them to steer what we do.

Six Stories Behind Every Claim

Heller opens with the airplane seat. In studies, he says, about half of passengers believe that if the recline button is there, they may recline, and the other half believe the space in front of them belongs to their knees and laptop. Airlines control that space and keep the rule deliberately ambiguous so they can, in effect, sell the same wedge of space twice on every seat. Heller compares ownership to rocket engineering: it is designed just as intensely, though people rarely notice. He identifies six stories that everyone uses: first come, first served; possession; labor, or "you reap what you sow"; attachment, meaning something is mine because it is attached to something already mine; self-ownership of our bodies; and family, which governs wealth as it moves at birth, death, marriage, and divorce.

The Fox and the Home Run Ball

Every law student, Heller notes, learns Pierson v. Post, the 1805 New York case about a fox chased along a beach by one hunter and killed and carried off by another. The court gave the fox to the one who actually captured it, and that "rule of capture" was later extended to oil, gas, water, and minerals. He then turns to Barry Bonds's 73rd home run. Alex Popov got the ball in the tip of his glove before a crowd knocked it loose, and Patrick Hayashi picked it up. The judge, after consulting law professors, ordered the ball auctioned and the proceeds split. Heller calls that ex post reasoning, asking what is fair between the two people in court. He prefers an ex ante approach, asking which rule produces the best results going forward. Because many fans are hurt by foul balls every year, he would reward the fan who brings a glove and slows the ball, not the one who simply picks it up.

Possession and the Rose Garden

Possession, Heller says, is an ancient principle that he traces back to the Code of Hammurabi. His modern example is a dispute in Boulder, Colorado, where a neighbor, a retired judge, used part of an adjoining couple's lot for a garden and a path and then won title to it through adverse possession. The community was outraged, and the Colorado legislature tightened the doctrine. He walks through the elements: entry, open and notorious use, exclusive use for the statutory period, and a claim of right. In practice, he says, the test comes down to whether the person used the land the way an ordinary owner would. Statutory periods range from about seven years to more than 20. He adds that prescriptive easements, like a regular shortcut across a neighbor's land, are more common than people think, but that almost all ownership disputes are settled informally. Law, in his view, is substantially overrated.

Up to the Sky, Down to the Depths

Attachment asks how far ownership of land extends up and down. Heller describes a Kentucky man who shot down a drone over his backyard and was charged with wanton endangerment, only to have a local judge dismiss the charge on the theory that the drone was trespassing. Heller does not believe that decision is good law, but he says the general question of how much airspace an owner controls is open, and drones are at the cutting edge of it. The same question arises with wind and solar potential. Heller calls attachment the most important ownership principle that most people do not know. It works like a "wealth magnet," quietly assigning new resources to people who already own property, and he sees it beneath many familiar forms of inequality.

Attachment for the Common Good

Attachment also has a powerful upside, Heller says. Many of the most effective environmental tools rely on it. Forest dwellers often value a tree only if it is cut down, so carbon offset and cap-and-trade programs treat standing trees as if they were attached to the land those people control, letting wealthy countries and companies pay to keep forests standing. He describes a Sunnyvale, California, dispute in which a homeowner's redwoods shaded a neighbor's solar panels. Under a state solar-access law, the tree owners were criminally convicted, and the resulting outcry led California to protect trees planted before the panels went up. He also discusses a Florida beach-restoration project in Destin, where oceanfront owners objected that the new sand would be open to the public. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the owners lost 8 to 0.

Inheritance, Heirs' Property, and Gridlock

Heller argues that the United States has two inheritance systems: a harsh default regime for people who die without wills, often poorer families and communities of color, and a flexible system for the very wealthy that can make paying taxes nearly voluntary. He recounts how roughly a million Black farm families had acquired land by the 1920s, and how Black landownership has since fallen dramatically. Racist violence and discrimination played a large part, he says, but so did a less visible mechanism. Families who avoided Southern white lawyers often died without wills, so their land passed in ever-smaller fractions to heirs. Speculators could buy a tiny share from a distant heir and force a partition sale of the entire farm, often to themselves. Heller calls this "ownership gridlock," a concept from his earlier work that also appears in drug patents and telecommunications. He credits Professor Thomas Mitchell with designing the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which gives family members a right of first refusal and time to raise financing.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Self-ownership, Heller says, is the most personal ownership story and is always considered against the history of slavery. American law tends to treat bodily resources like a light switch: you can sell your hair but not your kidney. He proposes a dimmer instead, with the sacred at one end and ordinary market goods at the other. His example is surrogacy, which he traces from the biblical story of Hagar to the Baby M case of the 1980s. Gestational surrogacy, in which the surrogate has no genetic tie to the child, has changed the landscape, and paid surrogacy is now legal in most states. He notes that New York legalized it in 2021, after years in which New Yorkers crossed into New Jersey to hire surrogates.

Reaping What We Sow, and Mickey Mouse

Labor is the intuition behind patents and copyrights, but Heller argues it can lead to overprotection. Copyright began with a 14-year term, renewable once. Disney, he says, twice went to Congress for 20 more years to protect Mickey Mouse, most recently through the 1998 extension often called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. He calls it an outrage that kept American culture from the 1920s through the 1940s out of the public domain, so that more books from before 1920 are in print than from the decades after. He closes on the book's central theme: ownership feels natural, like waiting in line at Starbucks, until you notice the people with the app collecting their drinks first. Ownership is always up for grabs, and savvy owners pick the rules that benefit them.

What to Know Now

This conversation was recorded in early 2021, just before Mine! was published, and several of the stories Heller tells have moved on. Mickey Mouse's first screen appearance, in the 1928 short Steamboat Willie, entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2024, though later versions of the character and Disney's trademarks remain protected. Since 2019, a new year of works has entered the public domain every January 1. On January 1, 2026, works from 1930 became free to use, including the first appearances of Betty Boop and Pluto. Surrogacy law has continued to shift as well. New York's Child-Parent Security Act took effect on February 15, 2021. Michigan, the last state with a broad criminal ban on surrogacy contracts, legalized compensated gestational surrogacy through a law that took effect in April 2025. The Baby M case Heller mentions was decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1988. The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act has been adopted in roughly two dozen states, along with the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The other disputes have also been resolved, at least for now. After the Boulder case, Colorado amended its statute in 2008 to require an adverse possessor to show a good-faith belief that the land was theirs and to let courts order payment to the record owner. California amended its Solar Shade Control Act in 2008 to exempt trees planted before a neighbor's solar system was installed. The Kentucky drone owner's federal lawsuit against the man who shot it down was dismissed in 2017 for lack of federal jurisdiction, so how far a landowner's rights extend into low-altitude airspace remains unsettled. The Destin case, Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, was decided in 2010. Heller's broader point about owners choosing the rules has played out in newer fights. California's AB 2426, in effect since January 1, 2025, bars digital storefronts from using words like "buy" for movies, games, and e-books unless they clearly disclose that the customer is getting a revocable license. Right-to-repair laws have spread, beginning with Colorado's 2023 law for farm equipment. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission sued Deere & Company over tractor repair restrictions, and in July 2026 the FTC and five states reached a settlement requiring Deere to give farmers and independent shops the same repair tools and software as its dealers for 10 years.