Mixing Labour and Mixed Property: The Law of Locke's Original Appropriation.

Locke's famous account of labor-mixing in acquiring property is often treated as a metaphor: labor cannot be literally mixed with objects. This article situates Locke's vocabulary and argument of "mixing," "joining," and "annexing" in a long legal tradition of writing about mixed, joined, and fused substances in property acquisition. It suggests that Locke's account can be textually and contextually interpreted as an example of accession and specification-civil and common legal modes of original acquisition through mixing properties-and that this account solves many of the famous criticisms of Locke's theory of property.