Definition
Intangible property is property that has no physical form — it cannot be touched or held — but nonetheless carries legal rights and economic value. The value inheres not in any object itself but in what the property represents: a claim, a right, a relationship, or an interest.
Intangible property divides broadly into two categories:
1. Evidenced intangibles: Rights that are represented by a physical instrument but whose value derives from the underlying right, not the paper. Stock certificates, bonds, promissory notes, and negotiable instruments fall here. The paper is merely the vehicle; the right is the asset.
2. Pure intangibles: Rights with no physical embodiment at all. Intellectual property (patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets), goodwill, licenses, franchises, contractual rights, and chose in action are the primary examples. Nothing tangible stands in for these rights — they exist entirely as legal constructs.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Intangible" means something that cannot be physically touched or perceived directly by the senses; abstract or immaterial.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Not tangible; incapable of being touched; not perceptible to the touch; impalpable; incorporeal."
The common meaning captures the physical dimension accurately — intangible property genuinely cannot be touched. The gap lies in what the common definition omits: in law, intangibility does not mean a thing lacks value or legal consequence. Intangible property is often among the most commercially significant assets a person or entity holds. A patent portfolio or a franchise can be worth far more than any warehouse of physical goods. Researchers should resist any instinct to treat "intangible" as shorthand for "minor" or "incidental."
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Common Confusion
Intangible property is frequently conflated with personal property, as if the two were coextensive. They are not. Intangible property is a subset of personal property — all intangible property is personal property, but personal property includes tangible movables (goods, livestock, equipment) as well. The confusion matters in historical sources, where "personal property" was the dominant category and "intangible" was used primarily in the tax context to carve out a particular type of personal property for separate treatment.
Intangible property is also sometimes confused with incorporeal hereditaments — a traditional common law category of non-physical property interests in land (such as easements, rents, and profits). The two overlap conceptually but are not equivalent. Incorporeal hereditaments attach to real property; intangible personal property does not.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Financial intangibles: Stocks, bonds, notes, negotiable instruments, bank accounts, receivables.
Intellectual property: Patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and related rights.
Goodwill: The commercial value attached to a business's reputation, customer relationships, and going-concern status.
Franchises and licenses: Grants of rights to operate, use, or practice, whether from a government or a private party.
Contractual rights and choses in action: The right to enforce a contract or bring a legal claim. These are intangible assets capable of assignment and valuation.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term "intangible property" was not a fixture of general property law doctrine in the classical common law period. It emerged as a functional category primarily in tax law, where the question of what is taxable and on what basis required drawing distinctions among asset types. Researchers working in historical sources — especially before the mid-twentieth century — should expect to find intangible property discussed in tax treatises and revenue statutes rather than general property treatises, which tended to organize around the tangible/real property axis.
For intellectual property research, the category matters because IP's status as property — and the specific nature of that property — was contested through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early sources may treat patents and copyrights as sui generis grants rather than as a recognized species of intangible property. The modern framing of IP as intangible personal property is relatively recent in doctrinal terms.
Valuation is the recurring practical challenge for intangible property across multiple research contexts: taxation, bankruptcy, divorce, damages, and commercial transactions. Historical sources will show widely varying approaches to how intangibles are measured, transferred, and protected — far less settled than the treatment of real or tangible personal property.
Researchers should also watch for jurisdictional treatment of intangible property in conflict-of-laws contexts. Because intangibles have no physical situs, courts and legislatures have adopted differing rules for determining where intangible property is "located" for purposes of tax, succession, and attachment.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) situates intangible property squarely in the taxation context: "used chiefly in the law of taxation, this term means such property as has no intrinsic and marketable value, but is merely the representative or evidence of value, such as certificates of stock, bonds, promissory notes, and franchises." The definition is notable for what it reveals about the state of the doctrine at the time of publication: the category was understood primarily as a tax classification, not as a general organizing concept for property law.
The Black's definition also reflects the evidenced-intangibles model — it lists instruments and certificates that stand as representatives of value. Pure intangibles such as goodwill, trade secrets, and contractual rights are not foregrounded, suggesting that the category had not yet been fully theorized to encompass all non-physical property rights. Modern usage has expanded well beyond this formulation.
No other source dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus currently cover this term. The Black's entry, while thin by modern standards, is a reliable marker of the term's early doctrinal home.
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Jurisdictional Note
State taxation of intangible property has varied significantly, with some states historically imposing intangible property taxes (on stocks, bonds, and similar instruments) and others exempting such property entirely. These differences affect both historical research into state tax law and modern research into asset structuring and domicile planning. Federal tax law operates on a different framework and has driven much of the definitional development for intangible property since the mid-twentieth century.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Personal Property — Intellectual Property as Personal Property (Overview), The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia
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