Liberal Theory of Property – LPE Project

Liberal Property for Skeptics, Part 1

Luke Herrine — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. In A Liberal Theory of Property (Cambridge, SSRN), I argue that in a liberal polity the primary commitment to individual autonomy, which must dominate property’s justification, also shapes its constitution...

Source

Creating Space for Property’s Foes

Luke Herrine — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. I came away from A Liberal Theory of Property thinking (as I often do) about a Bruce Springsteen song. In “Mansion on the Hill”, the narrator tells of driving with his father to “look up at” a mansion...

Source

Property Without Autonomy

Luke Herrine — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. It is a heart wrenching line from a painful scene in the 1984 film adaptation of the children’s novel The NeverEnding Story. Rockbiter, a giant anthropomorphic stone creature, sits, forlorn.

Source

Property, Collectivity, and Restraint

Luke Herrine — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. For readers like me, reading Hanoch Dagan’s A Liberal Theory of Property, will be both enriching and painful. The book is enriching because it is a highly engaging explication of what property could be...

Source

Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism

LPE Blog — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 04:01:00 +0000

This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the lack...

Source

Property’s Contingent Categorization

Luke Herrine — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. I would dearly love to live in Hanoch Dagan’s world. Like its author, it is a generous place, dedicated to attractive values, and it seems, by all reports, to be populated by legal systems where the is and...

Source

Liberalism, Property, and the Means of Production

Luke Herrine — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:00:00 +0000

In this post, we specifically consider liberal defenses of private property in the “means of production". This focus allows us to put the liberal defense of private property into dialogue with Marxism, with which it shares a broad humanistic heritage and many particular normative framings. Our focus also connects liberal property theory with a variety of later critiques of private property in certain productive resources, including those of the progressive and realist lawyers who generated American doctrines concerning “public utility” and other modes of resource governance that are neither strictly “private property” nor strictly matters of state control.