• comparative law
• digital objects
• legal history
• numerus clausus of property objects
• property law

This thesis analyses the role digital objects play in the legal system. Today, we are witnessing a progressive digitalisation of our environment, and digital objects are growing to represent a more and more significant source of wealth. However, despite the crucial role they play, their legal status is still unclear. Are they goods or services? Do they fall under the Law of Obligation or the Law of Property? Are they a tertium genus 'under construction'? These are the questions this dissertation wants to face. With this aim in mind, part I, after outlining the research method we will draw from, provides a thorough naturalistic description of digital objects as extra-juridical and a-relational entities. Then, using prototypical definitions, it discusses the very notion of property law, and it shows that digital objects might reasonably fall within the proprietary domain. Part II builds on the conclusion of part I, and explains, through comparative legal history, why property law taxonomies generally exclude digital objects. The answer, we believe, is in the 'numerus clausus principle of property objects', ie an operational - and often crypto-typical - principle that designs the external borders of the law of property by selecting suitable objects. Accordingly, part II moves on by extracting from legal data national versions of such principles. Finally, it concludes that the exclusion of digital objects from property law taxonomies is due to their inherent intangibility. In the end, part III tries to understand how the legal system, both at a national and supra-national level, is reacting to the progressive digitalisation of objects around us.