ABSTRACT
Property is more than domestic. It is international, transnational, and global. Its reach, its consequences, and its ideas can rarely be theorized effectively or contained entirely within national borders. It is produced through encounters between actors from multiple jurisdictions, and by law from multiple sources. It is not stable or static. It is contested and ever evolving. Common law property is not neutral or ahistoric. It was formed in particular moments, and it benefits particular constellations of power. Beginning with a history of several significant moments of property-related conflicts between foreign property claimants and domestic property holders, the Article puts forward the argument that these conflictual encounters constitute the basis for the formation of common law property thought as understood today. The development of property thought is then traced not as a linear trajectory without regard to the concrete historical and geographical circumstances, but rather as operating in the midst of different phases of socio-economic transformation. In examining that genealogy, and in placing property doctrine in a globalized sociological and political economic context, this Article attempts to reveal how the current moment of financial capitalism has mobilized a significant ceding of sovereignty and accountability to private actors through – often taken-for-granted – common law property regimes.
Gupta, Priya S, Globalizing Property (2020). University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 2020.
First posted 2022-04-18 13:00:41
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