Property law, in systems derived from English common law, is divided into personal and real property. Real property concerns itself with rights in  or relating to land. Personal property concerns itself with rights in personam, or relating to chattels. Gray & Gray  describe the definition of property in the modern sense as oscillating between 'competing models of property as a fact, property as a right, and property as a responsibility.

Declared ownership in and of itself is insufficient to constitute property in a legal sense. Rather, the notion of property arises where one can have his/her right to land or chattels respected and enforced by a court of law.

Property law is the area of law that governs the various forms of ownership in real property land as distinct from personal or movable possessions and in personal property, within the common law legal system. In the civil law system, there is a division between movable and immovable property. Movable property roughly corresponds to personal property, while immovable property corresponds to real estate or real property, and the associated rights and obligations thereon.

The concept, idea or philosophy of property underlies all property law. In some jurisdictions, historically all property was owned by the monarch and it devolved through feudal land tenure or other feudal systems of loyalty and fealty.Though the Napoleonic code was among the first government acts of modern times to introduce the notion of absolute ownership into statute, protection of personal property rights was present in medieval Islamic law and jurisprudence,and in more feudalist forms in the common law courts of medieval and early modern England.