The ownership of a thing is the right of one or more persons to possess and use it to the exclusion of others. In this Code, the thing of which there may be ownership is called property.
Cal. Civ. Code § 654
NATURE OF PROPERTY
Applied in 33 court decisions — leading case 25 Cal. 3d 813 - Lugosi v. Universal Pictures (1979)
Most recently applied in 4 Cal. 5th 467 - Heller Ehrman LLP v. Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (March 2018)
Enacted 1872.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: California Legislative Information. Reproduced from public-domain California statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.