Intellectual Property as Self-Ownership

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's fierce defense of her right to study, write, and publish despite institutional pressure reveals how intellectual freedom is inseparable from property rights. When authorities attempted to restrict her access to books and writing, they denied her fundamental claim to her own mind and labor. In libertarian justice, this principle holds that intellectual creations—poems, arguments, discoveries—belong to their creator as natural extensions of selfhood. Sor Juana's lived resistance shows that denying someone's intellectual property is a form of enslavement, stripping them of dominion over their own thought. This concept applies directly to modern questions of authorship, academic freedom, and the right to benefit from one's own knowledge production, challenging systems that extract intellectual labor without consent or compensation.