Natural law theory provides a set of supple, powerful tools for the investigation of a range of problems in economic life. Built on an awareness of the diversity of the aspects of flourishing and fulfillment and the importance of a limited number of practical principles, the natural law approach to moral, social, and political life leaves open a wide range of options among which morally responsible actors can select, while shaping their choices in accordance with the character of well being and the demands of reason.

The assignment of property rights is basic to any economic system. There is no single just system of property rights. Natural law theory does not dictate how property rights ought to be assigned, but it constrains judgments about them in several ways. It highlights rationales – personal and communal – that ought to be respected when property rights are assigned. It stresses the contingent character of such rights, and so undermines infl ated claims about their absolute status. And it emphasizes that a community's system of property rights is reasonable only to the extent that it actually benefits the community's members and their shared projects, and that such a system may sometimes rightly constrain the ways in which people use their property in light of the principles of practical reasonableness and the underlying rationales that justify the existence of a property system in the first place. At the same time, it also stresses that the failure to recognize stable property rights at all, or to deny recognition to certain specific kinds of rights, would likely be unjust.