In acts that are properly acts of justice (rather than, say, compassion or generosity), what is good for people is sought under the mediating description what is due them. The virtue of justice is the generalized concern that people get what is due them. Objective justice is the property of states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships in which people tend to get what is due them. So the virtue of justice is the concern that such objects have that property. When is some good or evil due a person? It is due on at least eight kinds of basis: desert, status, need, current possession, agreement, legality, parity, and freedom. We appeal to these conditions in justifying justice claims. The person who has the virtue of justice is one who is consistently and intelligently concerned that states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships be objectively just.

Kant’s Naturrecht Feyerabend lectures are contemporaneous to his Groundwork, which first sketches some key features of his Critical moral philosophy. Evidence of Kant’s Groundwork stands out when his lectures are compared to Achenwall’s Prolegomena and to Kant’s assigned text, Achenwall’s Ius naturae. Kant’s own Critical Rechtslehre, including his theory of property, develops much later, yet these lectures reveal several of Kant’s key issues and problems, his profound disagreements with traditional and contemporaneous natural law, some of his critical resources for radically improving philosophy of law. This chapter focuses on how Kant’s Critical issues and innovations pertain to individual rights to property.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

The chapter outlines the requirements for creating a valid pledge, including the necessity of an agreement and the transfer of possession.

The chapter then explores the concept of a lien, which grants a creditor the right to retain possession of a debtor’s property until the debt is satisfied. It explains the conditions under which liens arise, typically through the provision of services or materials that enhance the value of the property.

A significant portion of the chapter is dedicated to discussing the priority of claims. It explains how pledges and liens interact with other security interests and the legal rules that determine the priority of creditors’ claims. The chapter also details the enforcement mechanisms available to creditors, including the sale of the pledged or liened property and the distribution of proceeds.

By analyzing these aspects, the chapter provides a thorough understanding of the legal intricacies of pledges and liens, emphasizing their practical implications for securing and enforcing debts in China.

It begins by defining possession and its legal implications, detailing how possession is established, maintained, and protected. The chapter explores the rights and obligations of possessors and the legal remedies available in cases of wrongful possession or disputes. It then delves into the legal framework of expropriation, highlighting the conditions under which the state can expropriate private property. It discusses the procedural requirements for expropriation, including the need for public interest justification, fair compensation, and the legal processes involved in challenging expropriation decisions.

By analyzing these aspects, the chapter provides a comprehensive understanding of the balance between protecting individual property rights and the state’s power to expropriate property for public use. It highlights the challenges and legal safeguards in place to ensure fair and transparent expropriation practices, offering valuable insights into the complexities of possession and expropriation in the Chinese legal system.

This chapter studies the elements of an interest-based natural property right. To acquire a prima facie right in a resource, the claimant must use it productively and claim exclusivity to its use in terms others will understand. But the prima facie right may be overridden by either of two provisos. The sufficiency proviso limits property rights when a proprietor’s use of a resource does not leave others sufficient access to the same type of resource for their own needs. The necessity proviso limits natural rights when someone who does not hold property in a resource needs access to it to repel some serious threat to life or property. This chapter illustrates legal doctrines for capturing animals and other articles of personal property, occupying unowned land, and appropriating water flow by use. This chapter contrasts productive use with Locke’s treatments of labor, waste, and spoliation, and it contrasts claim communication with Pufendorf and Grotius’s treatments of possession. This chapter also considers familiar criticisms of rights-based property theories, involving hypotheticals with radioactive tomato juice or ham sandwiches embedded in cement.

Fueled in part by the wealth created from digital currencies, major art dealers such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s have embraced the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) attached to unique digital works of art. NFTs, how they are related to the blockchain, and the evolution of the market for digital art is the subject of this chapter. Despite recent decreases in value, it appears that digital art can be added to the growing list of uses for blockchain technology, which is now becoming a part of modern life. This chapter proceeds in five sections. First, the overview of the evolutionary progression of blockchain technology in the form of NFTs. Second, a description of the emergence of the market for digital art. Third, an explanation and historical account of digital art and related recent issues. Fourth, a coverage of the abrupt decline in the market price for many NFTs. And last, a conclusion, which focuses on how the dramatic extension of blockchain and other digital technology to the world of art represents a new and exciting platform for creative expression. This chapter offers a valuable addition to the literature by providing a readable introduction and overview of what is now known about the likely impact of blockchain technology and NFTs to art. Additionally, this important development should have a significant impact on the future of innovation and property law.

Chapter three turns to the recently conquered (1492) kingdom of Granada. In the late 1560s, the Crown began to use the Council of Trent as the justification to enact legislation that criminalized as heterodox facets of local culture. The native granadino community responded by launching a secessionist rebellion (the War of the Alpujarras, 1568-1571). The Crown eventually defeated the rebels, and as retribution forcibly removed the native community from Granada inland. Subsequently, those “moriscos” desiring to return to their homeland were required to petition and make the case that they would integrate with their “Old Christian” neighbors. Analyzing legal determinations made by the tribunal that assessed applications made by former residents, I show how the responsible magistrates incorporated standards of Christian citizenship defined in synods and councils in their decisions. I also reveal how in the battle over rights, early modern lawyers for dispossessed converts effectively employed legal arguments about prescriptive possession and therefore dominium over the identity category of Old Christian, which guaranteed society’s most extensive range of rights and privileges.

This chapter begins with a consideration of the importance to sovereignty of the right to deport. Beyond exploring what constitutes sovereignty and how such power is preserved and held, it examines why so little attention has been paid to life after expulsion. Expulsion (real or threatened) kidnaps time, creates unlimited forms of captivity, invigorates shame, normalizes violence, and stabilizes concepts such as citizenship and belonging. Showing the long buried links between colonial and US treatment of Indigenous peoples and contemporary deportation practices, the chapter reveals how knitted into the imaginary of belonging forced removal has become. While scholars have slowly begun exploring the experience of life after forced removal, writers of fiction have taken up the question as well and have begun offering portraits of the experience of navigating detention camps and rebuilding a life that might be sustainable after the violence of expulsion. Novels by Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, Lisa Ko, Helton Habila, Mohshin Hamid, and Jenny Erpenbeck are examined in detail because of their careful attention to living a deportable and deported life.

The nineteenth-century theorists of modern Romanist dominium, the great French treatise writers and the German Romanists, embarked in a quest for coherence, aspiring to develop a body of property law that was both normatively and conceptually coherent. These jurists sought to build an architecture of logically interrelated property doctrines informed by the unifying commitment to maximizing the owner’s freedom of action. Yet, this coherence was illusory. Far from being coherent, modern property was riven with tensions that could hardly be disguised. This chapter examines the jurists’ attempts to deal with four doctrines that threatened to strain the coherence of the property system: emphyteusis, possession, the limits on ownership and common ownership. While ultimately unsuccessful, these attempts are nonetheless worth exploring. For one thing, these failed attempts opened rifts in the apparently solid edifice of modern dominium, rifts that, a couple of decades later, the social critics will be quick to exploit. Most importantly, the jurists’ efforts to ease these tensions throw into sharp relief a diversity of ideological and methodological views that hardly surfaces in the nineteenth-century property treatises.

This chapter explores the nature of possession of property and what it means in the different contexts of personal property and land. Although the law characterises property in personal property or goods and in land in distinct ways, possession provides a shared conceptual link a party in possession of land or of personal property will generally have a right to protect that property against interference by any third party (except the true owner).

In the introduction we describe the “wicked” global property problem of homeless squatting on empty land or in empty properties and outline some key themes explored in the book. We reflect on the nature of squatting as a property problem; and introduce the concept of “scale,” which we deploy throughout the book to describe the dynamic nature of state responses to squatting. We outline the importance of seeing “the state” in the analyses of squatting and other property problems, through its interactions with individuals, interactions with other state-bodies, and interactions with its territory, and interactions with its own institutions. Finally, we set out the structure and approach followed in the book, including reference to five primary jurisdictions: the USA, Ireland, Spain, South Africa and England and Wales.

In Chapters 6–8, we examine how state responses to squatting, and the lenses through which the competing claims of stakeholders are seen, articulated, prioritized, and evaluated, frame debates about homeless squatting in empty land in the context of complex, competing, multi-scalar normative goals. In doing so, we continue to recognize that squatting conflicts are embedded in political, economic, cultural, social, and legal jurisdictional contexts, and that, in these contexts, assumed identities and characteristics are assigned to competing actors, as legal and extra-legal norms are applied to tackle problems and adjudicate conflicts. In this chapter we focus, firstly, on the conceptual and pragmatic meanings – and the “scaled production” – of possession in common law and civil law traditions. We then examine how the act of squatting, and the status of squatters, has been rescaled in recent years. On one axis, we read adaptations in state responses to property events – for example, the criminalization of squatting – as reflecting the upscaling or elevation of the squatting “event.” The criminalization of squatting – or any other erstwhile non-criminal activity – signals that a previously low-stake event has accrued high-stakes impact for the state. It reveals new or emerging pressures on the state to take “other-regarding” action, mediating directly between competing (erstwhile private) claims (for example, owners, squatters, investors, neighbors). And the nature of the state’s response signals to the alignment of particular resilience claims with the state’s (or the government’s) own resilience needs. In focusing on the problem of homeless squatting on empty land through the prism of the homeless squatter, we adopt the framing techniques discussed in Chapter 5: placing the squatter at the center of the network of competing stakeholders and examining the “webby relations” that shape, mediate and separate representations of squatters in accounts of homeless squatting on empty land.

Starting from a cognitive point of view, this paper provides an entirely new reading of the dances and chants of the Salian priests. By focusing on their dances and chants in the perspective of embodied cognition and by putting a diligent analysis of (a) the reports and (b) the prayer texts into historical comparisons with other ‘prophetic’ practices of that time, this study is able to elucidate the Salian performances as body techniques that go beyond a mere facilitation of sociality. These techniques alter the practitioners’ states of mind and thereby elicit an experience that one may call religious experience, divine experience, or ‘possession’.

This chapter examines cultural exchange, change, and continuity through the lens of population movement: migration, immigration, refugees, displacement, diaspora, and the modes of transportation that brought diverse people into direct engagement with each other.