I begin by highlighting three characteristics that ancient elites imagined that enslaved persons ought to have: usefulness, loyalty, and property. I start by noting how discourses of enslavement and utility are intertwined. The Shepherd’s concern for utility is most clearly expressed in its two visions of a tower under construction, in which enslaved believers are represented as stones who will be useful (or not) for the construction of the tower before the eschaton. Second, I turn to the concept of loyalty (pistis), suggesting that the Shepherd uses such language in a way that encourages God’s enslaved persons to exhibit loyalty to God at all costs. Finally, I point to how enslaved persons in antiquity were often characterized as commodified by placing the Shepherd alongside inscriptions about enslaved people from Delphi and documentary correspondence. Not only does the Shepherd portray its protagonist Hermas as lacking bodily autonomy while being exchanged between divine actors, but the text also calls on God’s enslaved persons to purchase other enslaved people who are imagined to be their physical property (e.g., as houses, fields) when they arrive in God’s city.

The late twentieth-century recognition of indigenous peoples as collective subjects of human rights represents a case of “iconic indexicality,” as international human rights instruments held out promises of recognizing difference, repairing colonial harms, and reckoning with the slow violence of genocide. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, indigenous peoples in Guatemala mobilized human rights through legal actions to defend their ancestral territories and ways of being, mirroring similar processes occurring across Latin America. Yet at the same time the intensification of extractive industries deepened processes of capture of state apparatus by corrupt elites and criminal networks, leading to backlash and the stalling or reversal of earlier legal victories. Today indigenous communities and their allies are subject to systematic criminalization and renewed processes of legalized violent dispossession. This chapter argues that the current “juristocratic reckoning” with the promise of indigenous rights must be viewed in the longue durée. Indigenous people have engaged with hegemonic forms of law since conquest, and although these engagements acquired new dimensions and intensity during the twentieth century’s “age of human rights” (Goodale 2022), they were accompanied by a keen awareness of the historical role of law in old and new forms of colonial violence and dispossession. This is because colonial legal orderings of land and territorial resources are always racially constituted. As Nichols (2020), Di Giminiani (2018) and others have shown, the laws of the colonizers remade indigenous worlds by constituting land as an alienable object (“property”), displacing alternative “land ontologies” to justify racialized inequalities grounded in systemic violence. The late twentieth-century turn to law by indigenous peoples never supplanted other horizons of justice premised on alternative lifeworlds; indeed, the juristocratic shift and its centering of “self-determination” served to amplify claims and histories conceived prior to and beyond human rights law. As this chapter shows, through processes of judicialization indigenous lawyers’ collectives in Guatemala have meticulously documented long-run theft of indigenous lands and appealed to less individually centered and proprietary understandings of land to stake decolonial claims to self-determination. Various mechanisms have been deployed; for example, special expert witness reports or different forms of indigenous self-representation in court to amplify alternative ontologies within the public sphere. This strategic, discursive, and affective engagement with the law is just one part of ongoing processes to strengthen autonomous self-governance.

This chapter charts how, from the early eighteenth century, imperial elites projected visions of improvement and abundance onto Russia’s wetlands, reimagining them as fuel deposits. The prospect of substituting peat for timber motivated state officials, landowners, scientists, and later the directors of industrial companies to explore ways to convert peat into heat energy. The chapter argues that the appropriation of wetlands for fuel generation was, by and large, an elite project that imposed the developmentalist visions of the imperial state and industrial elites on peatlands and the people living with them. While most peasants continued valuing peatlands for what they offered above ground, elite groups conceptualized peat as a substance on its own rather than a component of a larger web of relationships co-created by living organisms, water, abiotic matter, and the climate. This reductive understanding of peatlands would underpin the history of peat extraction in central Russia until the end of the Soviet period.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Article 1 of the First Protocol (A1P1) to the ECHR states that every natural and legal person has a right to enjoyment of their possessions. The meaning of the text is anything but straightforward. There is no mention of companies but in common and civil law jurisdictions there is no doubt that companies are ‘legal persons’ (‘personnes morales’). Neither is the term ‘property’ used. Instead, the French version uses the term ‘biens’ whilst the English version uses the word ‘possessions’. Nor does the English text proclaim a right to own property but mentions instead enjoyment of possessions. Yet it is well established in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR that A1P1 protects property rights and that companies have standing to launch claims as victims of violations of their right to property. Why was this not made unambiguously clear by the drafters? And why would a human rights treaty include companies as victims of violations of human rights?The drafting history reveals that the wording of A1P1 was a political compromise,obfuscating the legal reach of protection of A1P1 andits dissonance with the moral foundations of universal human rights.

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.

Private law theory is pulled in opposite directions: internal and external perspectives on law; holistic and reductionist methodologies; conceptualist and nominalist views; and deontological and consequentialist approaches. Relatedly, theories tend to focus on the micro or the macro scales – interpersonal relations or societal effects – but face difficulties in connecting them. In this paper, we examine these problems in private law theory through the lens of the legal phenomenology of Adolf Reinach. According to Reinach, the law presupposes a realm of real, timeless entitles and their workings that are synthetic a priori: they are neither conventional nor contingent. Nor are they inherently moral or customary. We argue that regardless of the ontological status of what Reinach identifies as a priori, it points toward something more robust than most current theories would countenance. We illustrate the usefulness of this perspective through Reinach’s analysis of property, transfer, and representation. Reinach captures features and generalizations that have eluded analysis, as, for example, when he treats the principle of nemo dat quod non habet (‘one cannot transfer what one does not own’) as underlying all transfer even if displaced by positive rules such as good faith purchase. His views also point toward the importance of accessibility for legal concepts, including cases of tacit knowledge. Whatever its exact source, this “deep structure” of the law has the potential to partially reconcile some of the fissures in private law theory and to connect the micro and the macro through a better understanding of system in law.

The state of nature in social contract theories tells us two stories, one about who the main political actors are, and another one about the supra-juridical normativity and principles those actors use to judge and act politically once they are in the civil state. In my chapter I focus on the latter matter by contrasting Kant’s approach to the state of nature and its role in his social contract theory as given in the Feyerabend lectures with the conceptions of the state of nature in Hobbes, Locke, Achenwall, and Rousseau. Following the thesis that pre-juridical normativity functions as supra-juridical normativity once in the state, my main question is: how is "natural", in the sense of "pre-political", normativity generated? With this I am referring not only to the source of normativity, but mainly to how pretensions of normativity arise when people interact in the state of nature, and if these are or are not regulated by a moral-legal order independent from that interaction.

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.

It explores the various methods of property acquisition under Chinese law. The chapter begins by distinguishing between original and derivative acquisition, emphasising the different processes involved in each. It highlights the legal nuances and state ownership implications, particularly in cases involving lost property and unowned estates.

The chapter then delves into the theory and practice of property transfer, discussing the principles governing the transfer of ownership through delivery (for movables) and registration (for immovables). A significant portion is dedicated to the land registration system, detailing its historical development, functions, and the dual registration models (mandatory and voluntary). It addresses the legal mechanisms for ensuring accurate registration, liability for mistakes and fraud, and the processes for rectifying errors. The chapter concludes by analyzing the different methods of delivery, both actual and constructive, and their implications for property rights transfer.

Psychology and law, by their nature, are deeply entwined. Both are about human behavior – understanding it, modifying it, regulating it. Psychology’s research engagement with legal topics enjoys a long history, but until recently has been largely limited to clinical assessment (e.g., capacity, insanity) and police and trial evidence and procedures (e.g., eyewitnesses, jury instructions). The traditional canon of “Psychology & Law” research gained prominence when DNA evidence revealed that many wrongful convictions involved problems foreseen by psychologists. Also, the emergence of “Behavioral Law & Economics” likely provided more legitimacy to law’s engagement with empirical psychology topics and methods, spurring “Law & Psychology” teaching and research in law schools. The expanded range of research can be found across the US law curriculum as illustrated in four main first-year courses – Criminal Law, Torts, Contracts, and Property – and two commonly taken or required courses – Evidence and Professional Responsibility. The current experimental jurisprudence boom has added to the topics and methods used in this research and amplifies the existing trend in which psychology engages more closely with the content and values of law.

This chapter examines how property regimes are likely to respond to the significant increase in average life expectancy predicted by “100-year life” theories. It takes a relatively pessimistic position, arguing that the optimal institutional response to demographic aging will be very difficult to produce: some countries, most notably the US, are likely to underrespond to the socioeconomic demands that demographic aging will probably impose on property law, whereas others, such as China and Japan, may well overrespond. This is because, within the realm of property rights and regulation, the economics and politics of demographic aging may well contradict each other: aging potentially reinforces political opposition to public governance even as it creates economic demand for it.

As people live longer, how will they change the way they transfer their property when they die? This chapter argues that death-time transfers will become less important, not more. Longer lifespans will deplete more of the wealth people might have otherwise transferred upon their deaths and will necessitate transfers earlier in donors’ lifetimes to ensure wealth can be accessed by children and other donees at times when they are still young enough to use the wealth productively. Enabling flexibility in the timing of transfers will require changes to income, estate, and gift tax policies that currently favor transfers at death. Will-making will become less important as people use up their wealth or transfer it before their deaths.