ABSTRACT
Property rights are powerful. They fundamentally shape both the physical world and our social relations within it. Property choices impact how land and other resources are used (or conserved) and who has access to those resources (or who is excluded). At the same time, cultural discourses about property rights often deviate from these legal realities. These conversations can, over time, influence and change legal realities. In both Australia and the United States, the cultural discourse of property rights is so influential that it not only infuses legal discourse, but it can direct actual social outcomes and transform the land itself.
This chapter explores the relationship between legal reality and cultural experience across rural landscapes through a series of small case studies from Australia and the United States, including examples from ongoing right-to-farm movements and international pipeline protests. We focus on rural landscapes because the power of property rights to shape racial and national identities and cause environmental change is particularly visible in these spaces. Taking into account environmental scarcity, global conflict, and increasing inequality, different choices will need to be made about land use and ownership in future. Reimagining property rights will involve a reckoning with the consequences of the normative choices made to date and their power in changing the landscape itself. This moment requires urgent changes to the way we conceptualise and regulate the proper subjects and objects of property relations.
Graham, Nicole G and Shoemaker, Jessica A, Property Rights and Power Across Rural Landscapes (February 4, 2022) in Handbook of Property, Law, and Society (Routledge Press) (Margaret Davies, Lee Godden, and Nicole Graham eds) (2022 forthcoming).
First posted 2022-02-10 18:00:07
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