Women and Property inheritance is a complex issue in India. The Hindu Succession Laws give women inheritance rights on ancestral, acquired, and agricultural land. This has led to an increase in their bargaining power and a consequential increase in transaction costs, which ideally should challenge the ex-ante and ex-post HSAA 2005, Coasean cooperative equilibriums. While the normative Coasean theorem propounds the dismantling of cooperation with the rise in bargaining, the Hobbesian framework believes that cooperation can exist through coercion. This process, in which women have bargaining rights yet cooperate, happens through “covert coercion.” Despite increased bargaining powers, women are conflicted between inheritance and maintaining familial ties, where covert coercion forces them to let go of inheritance. The article investigates this conflict women face through the lens of Law, normative Coasean and Hobbesian frameworks, psychological costs, and their Lived Reality. Further, this article investigates various efficiency criteria.

The article looks at the question of how property is constitutive of identity. Dominance over material resources and formation of markers of identity are often conjoint processes aided by constitutional processes. We frame the discursive construction of property and public space in India through the judicial discourse on the hijab ban in colleges in the state of Karnataka. Courts often look at space as an autonomously existing physical object rather than a socially constructed arena to which access is granted or denied depending on one’s socio-cultural location. We suggest that this is a natural consequence of over-emphasizing the ‘thingness’ of property as opposed to understanding the discursive and historically contingent nature of property rights. This has a direct relation with how certain identities are allowed the freedom to make public spaces their own while others, though occupying these ostensibly neutral spaces, are not allowed to ‘perform’ their identities.

This article tries to understand the role of the idol as a juristic person in the Ram Janmabhumi judgment that resolved the issue of title, following from the Ayodhya dispute. I trace the link between the establishment of the idol as a juristic being and the governance of Hindu property, highlighting the point that an award of personhood to the idol is an award of rights to the community behind the idol. The details of the Ram Janmabhumi judgment show that juridically empowering the community behind the idol in an inter-community conflict has a different texture from an intra-community dispute. The implications of this are explored—first by understanding the nature of the rights created and the conflicts they generate (following the Italian jurist Sforza), and second by understanding this configuration of property rights as a positional good, positional goods being paramount in the production of an economy geared to ethno-nationalism.

This article examines interactions facilitated by legal pluralism in contemporary urban India. Employing a framework of semi-autonomous social fields, I focus on use rights exercised over “Waqf” properties and the role social fields so generated play in facilitating access to property rights for groups without social and economic capital. Viewing property through a relational lens and relying on the method of examining “trouble” disputes, I discuss two long-term disputes in a Sufi shrine of an urban village called Mehrauli, Delhi. I will advance two main arguments in the article. First, the operation of formal and informal legal orders forms a generative ground making access to resources more equitable. Second, formal and informal legal orders interact to form a dialectical relationship, such that it becomes difficult to tell which of the two is superior.

The widening inequality and discontent concern every economy irrespective of any measure of economic prosperity. The contest and debate centred around the notion of private property, assumes the premise that property is a legitimised unfettered accumulation with a right-based justification. On the contrary, the Gandhian conception of property, tries to reframe the premise that property is social and needs to be justified over its obligatory commitments. I argue that Gandhi’s engagement with property relations reflects the individual pursuit by socialising property. From problematising the individual property rights within the Anthropocene world, the article mapping a Gandhian theory of property identifies the normative structure of property. The individual as the custodian with normative obligatory commitments can foster pluralistic interest while anchoring the ethical foundations of property rights reflecting social justice.

There are several examples of collective action/social movements for the environmental cause in India. The literature on environmental governance and environmental economics, identifies a significant role of the nature of environmental goods with respect to the twin classifying criteria of rivalry in consumption and excludability. The common pool resource and public good nature of environmental property require varied governance approaches. These economic theory-based classifications can be associated with diverse types of property rights regimes in the legal realm. By developing an analytic narrative, this article attempts to identify how common individuals related with environmental movements, identify some of these nuances with respect to nature of environmental goods and associated property rights regimes and develop strategies for improvements. This article utilises secondary qualitative data to examine the perspective of common individuals, groups, and leaders of environmental movements to infer theoretical learnings from a few cases in India.

The persistence of customary land use practices is a significant focus in the sociology of law. This paper examines this issue by analysing the ongoing practice of farmland reallocation in rural China, where villages periodically reallocate farmland based on household size. Although the Rural Land Contract Law (RLCL) prohibits this practice and emphasizes the protection of farmers’ property rights, it continues to persist. Research has found that village elites who are well versed in the RLCL often maintain this practice by exploiting legal exceptions. However, for this practice to continue, it requires the support of ordinary farmers, making their legal knowledge crucial. Based on this, the paper hypothesizes that the practice persists because legal knowledge has not yet widely spread among farmers. While this hypothesis was not confirmed through the survey, the findings suggest that state law remains distant from ordinary farmers, almost as if it is irrelevant to them.