The right to determine how one's ideas, writings, and intellectual work are transmitted, interpreted, and used after one's lifetime.
After Sor Juana's death, her work was subject to reinterpretation, censorship, and appropriation by those who had no stake in her intentions or values. Her manuscripts were controlled by others; her legacy was shaped by institutional narratives she did not authorize. Yet she persists: her words, her courage, her example survive and inspire precisely because intellectual work has a life beyond its creator. In libertarian justice, this raises a profound question: What property rights do we have in our legacy? Sor Juana's example suggests that while we cannot control how future generations interpret our work, justice requires that we retain the right to express our intentions, that deliberate misrepresentation be recognized as a form of theft, and that our intellectual heirs have some obligation to engage our work honestly. Her life insists that intellectual property rights extend beyond death—not as absolute control, but as respect for authorial intent and honest inheritance.
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