In 2002′s United States v. Craft, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the first principles of property law in a case dealing with — of all things — a tax lien: “A common idiom describes property as a ‘bundle of sticks’ — a collection of individual rights which, in certain combinations, constitute property.”
The “bundle of sticks” metaphor is derived from Aesop’s fable of the same name. In the fable, a father laments the bickering and disunity of his sons. He summons them to his deathbed and asks them to break a bundle of sticks. Try as they might, they cannot. Then he asks them each to take an individual stick and break it. They do so easily.
