In “May Lockean Doughnuts Have Holes?” Steiner addresses Nine's objection to a Lockean theory of state territorial rights. Nine lists three types of territorial power: 1) jurisdictional authority to impose laws within a given territory, 2) meta-jurisdictional authority to establish jurisdictions or amend existing ones, and 3) rights held by individuals and groups in a jurisdiction to own property (Nine 150). On the Lockean view property rights are natural rights, so the property rights of individuals in the state of nature necessarily involve jurisdictional and meta-jurisdictional rights (151-52). Nine holds that state jurisdictional authority cannot be derived from the meta-jurisdictional authority of individual property owners, as “each individual's thereby implied right of secession is inconsistent with how we conceive of states' territorial rights” (Steiner 952). Her problem lies with this unsatisfiable criterion: states have …show more content…
He argues that neither reading will be appealing, therefore creating a “dilemma” for those rejecting a Lockean account of territorial rights. If Nine accepts the former, states possessing separate from their mainlands, such as the US with Alaska, will be excluded. This account would be drastically unlike the common conceptualization of territorial rights. If the latter understanding is accepted, however, individuals holding meta-jurisdictional authority is unproblematic, since individuals can freely (and feasibly) exercise their right to secession without disrupting state territorial unity