Pardon me for resurrecting an old thread, but it was referenced on a more recent thread and I missed it the first time around.
I don't believe in property as a fundamental right in the libertarian sense; I view it as more of a pragmatically useful concept. Property rights provide the incentive to invest and be productive. There's no incentive for me to work and save money if I can't reasonably expect the money to still be mine when I retire. There's no incentive for people in South American shanty-towns to build better homes and communities if the government can force them to move at the drop of a hat.
That doesn't mean that any particular distribution of property is 'sacred', though. In the case of latifundios, for example, economic productivity might actually be improved if the land were redistributed to be owned by the people actually working it. But to gain the economic benefits, that sort of "one-time" adjustment would have to be made in a way that doesn't undermine the fundamental idea of property ownership, so that the new owners could borrow based on their land, be confident of recouping their labor, etc.
Nor do general principles tell us how to weight property rights against other rights. Several US states recently voted down proposals to require the government to compensate land owners for any regulation that decreased the value of their property. These proposals unfairly valued property rights above, say, the right to have a pollution-free environment.
A common challenge comes when ownership-based property rights clash with our intuitive model of property rights, which is based on use. E.g. "I've had this job 10 years, I'm entitled to it"; or "I've lived in this apartment for 15 years, it's my home." I think the law can recognize some of those claims (e.g. requiring severance based on a person's length on the job, or notice or relocation assistance for a terminated lease) without fundamentally altering the notion of ownership.
The only way I can see the notion of property ownership being unnecessary is in a post-scarcity society. Unless/until we reach that point, some form of distribution of resources is necessary, and individual ownership is the only way that's decentralized enough to allow an economy to grow in the long term. But I do think it's healthy to take a step back sometimes, and remember that ownership is a pragmatic tool, and not a fundamental moral right.