Definition
Incorporeal property is property that has no physical existence — it cannot be touched, seen, or physically possessed, yet it carries enforceable legal rights. The value lies not in any tangible object but in the right itself: the right to receive income from land, to use another's property in a defined way, to enforce a debt, or to exclude others from using a creative work.
The concept divides property into two fundamental categories:
1. Corporeal property — things with physical substance (land, goods, buildings).
2. Incorporeal property — legal rights that exist independent of any physical object.
Classic examples include easements, rents, profits à prendre, franchises, copyrights, patents, debts, and annuities. At common law, incorporeal hereditaments were the primary category of incorporeal property relating to land — rights that could descend to heirs but had no body capable of physical delivery.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Incorporeal" means lacking a physical body or material form; not composed of matter.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Not corporeal; not having a material body or form; not consisting of matter; immaterial."
The ordinary meaning maps cleanly onto the legal meaning in one respect — both denote the absence of physical form. But the legal category does more than describe a quality of matter; it defines a mode of holding and transferring rights. The legal significance is not philosophical (the thing has no body) but practical: how is the right created, transferred, and enforced when there is nothing to hand over?
Common Confusion
Incorporeal property is frequently conflated with intangible property, particularly in modern commercial and tax contexts. The terms often overlap but are not identical. Incorporeal property is the classical common law and civil law category, focused on rights appurtenant to or associated with land (hereditaments) and on rights enforceable in law. Intangible property is the broader modern category that encompasses incorporeal hereditaments but also includes financial instruments, goodwill, trade secrets, and other assets that do not fit neatly into the traditional incorporeal framework.
Researchers should also distinguish incorporeal property from choses in action. Black's and Bouvier's both treat choses in action as the common law equivalent of incorporeal property in the civil law sense, but choses in action is narrower — referring specifically to rights enforceable through legal action (debts, claims), not to all incorporeal rights (an easement, for instance, is incorporeal but is not typically called a chose in action).
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
At common law, incorporeal hereditaments were the dominant recognized subtype of incorporeal property connected to land. Classical categories included:
— Easements (rights of way or use over another's land)
— Profits à prendre (rights to take natural resources from another's land)
— Rents (rights to receive periodic payment from land)
— Franchises (special privileges granted by the sovereign)
— Advowsons (rights of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice)
— Tithes (rights to a portion of the produce of land)
— Annuities (rights to periodic payments, not attached to land)
— Commons (rights shared with others to use another's land)
Modern incorporeal property extends to intellectual property rights (copyrights, patents, trademarks), contractual rights, and financial instruments, though these are typically analyzed under distinct legal regimes rather than the common law hereditament framework.
Why It Matters in Research
The term operates differently across legal traditions and historical periods, and conflating those contexts is a persistent research trap.
In civil law sources, incorporeal property is the baseline organizing concept for non-physical rights — the counterpart to choses in action at common law. Researchers moving between civil law jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, mixed-system sources) and common law sources will encounter the same underlying concept described with different vocabulary and structured differently in the source material.
In historical common law research, the operative term is incorporeal hereditaments, not incorporeal property. Before the mid-nineteenth century English statutory reforms (notably 8 & 9 Vict. c. 106), the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal property had immediate practical consequences: corporeal property was transferred by livery of seisin (physical delivery), while incorporeal property, incapable of physical delivery, required grant by deed. Statutes and decisions from before those reforms turn on that distinction in ways that are invisible if a researcher treats the historical and modern frameworks as equivalent.
In modern research, the classical framework largely survives as a structural concept in property law treatises and in cases involving easements, profits, and similar rights, but the vocabulary has shifted. Many modern courts and statutes use intangible property where earlier sources used incorporeal property. Searching historical databases exclusively on intangible will miss older authority; searching only on incorporeal will miss modern authority on the same rights.
The encyclopedia entries available in the Law Mind corpus on incorporation (corporate formation) and constitutional incorporation are unrelated to this term — those senses of "incorporation" refer to forming a legal entity and applying constitutional provisions to the states, respectively. Researchers should not follow those cross-references when investigating property doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's agree precisely on the core definition: incorporeal property in the civil law consists in legal right merely, and it is the civil law equivalent of choses in action at common law. The agreement is unsurprising — Bouvier's entry reproduces the formulation almost verbatim.
Bouvier's adds the historically significant gloss about livery: the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal property once determined how transfer was accomplished. Incorporeal property, having no physical existence, was incapable of livery of seisin and therefore could only pass by grant (deed). Bouvier's flags that this distinction was abolished in England by statute (8 & 9 Vict. c. 106, § 2), which aligns with the broader nineteenth-century rationalization of English real property law.
What both dictionaries understate is the modern extension of the concept. Neither Black's nor Bouvier's speaks to intellectual property, financial instruments, or the modern intangible property framework — they reflect the classical common law and civil law frameworks, not the contemporary landscape. A researcher relying solely on these entries would have a sound conceptual foundation but an incomplete picture of how incorporeal property analysis applies to patents, copyrights, or digital assets in contemporary doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Louisiana and Quebec, as mixed civil law/common law jurisdictions, use incorporeal property as a live doctrinal category in their property codes, not merely a historical label. In common law states, the classical terminology (incorporeal hereditaments) survives primarily in land rights contexts; modern statutes and courts more often use intangible property as the operative category for non-physical assets generally.