Imbedded in his discussion of property law, Kant comments that the range of a country's cannons to defend coastal waters it claims to possess is the appropriate standard for determining whether a piece of the ocean belongs to the claiming country or not. The comment comes as a surprise because it seems to raise an issue of international rather than property law. This feeling of surprise can be attributed to the traditional philosophical treatment of the issue of property rights, particularly property rights to land. Traditionally authors searching for a justification of ownership rights to land concentrated on why individuals can own land, but not on why a state has any right to an area over which it exercises its dominion. Kant, exceeding far beyond this philosophical tradition, seeks to provide one single justification for both individual and state rights to land because he realizes the issues are inseparably connected. Sections 1–17 of the Doctrine of Right, where Kant develops property law and its foundations, thus apply equally to an individual's acquisition and intelligible possession of a thing and to a state's acquisition and intelligible possession of an area of land.

In this chapter, we first discuss Kant's original community of the earth (communio fundi originaria) and the roots it has in the Grotius–Pufendorf tradition (section 1). We then explain why Kant claims that this community with its originally united will is original, meaning part of the lex iusti (section 2).