The work shows the legal significance of the forms of ownership for establishing the constitutionalmodel of the modern economy, for ensuring the balance of private and public spheres of activity,supporting promising and traditional economic structures. Using the methods of interdisciplinary analysis, as well as the methods of the constitutional economy, special attention is paid to thedisclosure of the socio-legal nature of public property. Based on the analysis of Russian legislationand the practice of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the qualitative developmentof the legal content of public property is shown, and the independent regulatory significance of thisinstitution is proved. In the past decade, through the public ownership, the legislator lawfully formspublic property, divides the property into different levels of power, connects the boundaries of itspower over the objects of property with functions, powers of the authorities, the principle of specialpurposedesignation and the principle of the unity of nature of state and municipal property.Thereare a number of issues in regulating aspects of public property, including the need to develop moreclear criteria for the delineation and redistribution of public property objects, the peculiarities of theregulation of certain property objects, especially the objects of the national (public) property. It isstated that the appearance of a significant amount of regulatory material on issues of public propertyrequires its systematization and streamlining in a special federal law.The emergence of variousquasi-public forms of property (formally private law), through which the state significantly increasesits presence in the economic life (for example, public-law companies), also belongs to the mostimportant problems. These forms introduce an imbalance in the principles of freedom and equallegal protection of participants in economic activity, and are also economically less effective. In thisregard, it is proposed to expand the understanding of public property by including in it the propertythat is under the direct actual control of the state. This will make it possible to justify the need for newlegal criteria for determining state participation in the economic sphere.