Presents a case for constitutional protection of entitlements as property. This book argues that the legal definition of property is based on expectations founded on positive law, which may or may not be related to the Lockean notion that labor creates property.

In this important work of legal, political, and moral theory, Joseph William Singer offers a controversial new view of property and the entitlements and obligations of its owners. Singer argues against the conventional understanding that owners have the right to control their property as they see fit, with few limitations by government. Instead, property should be understood as a mode of organizing social relations, he says, and he explains the potent consequences of this idea. Singer focuses on the ways in which property law reflects and shapes social relationships. He contends that property is a matter not of right but of entitlement—and entitlement, in Singer’s work, is a complex accommodation of mutual claims. Property requires regulation—property is a system and not just an individual entitlement, and the system must support a form of social life that spreads wealth, promotes liberty, avoids undue concentration of power, and furthers justice. The author argues that owners have not only rights but obligations as well—to other owners, to nonowners, and to the community as a whole. Those obligations ensure that property rights function to shape social relationships in ways that are both just and defensible.

This collection of essays examines central issues of property theory from a variety of perspectives.

There is more to parking law than just parking penalties. Considering the ways in which law works in everyday life, and in familiar places of common experience where the presence of law is not obvious, this book explores the various notions of the right to park, which jurisprudentially is enacted between individuals in everyday parking. From parking areas to the courtroom, parking engenders disputes over equality, speech, legitimacy, and entitlement that reach beyond the stated scope of policy. Looking beyond the obvious, this book examines the contested site of the parking space as a place of socio-legal meaning where property claims and rights shape identities. Adopting a constitutive approach to the study of law, the book examines how regulation of parking policy is at odds with the force of localised politics, producing competing notions of legality and examples of legal semiotics within the terrain of legal geography.

Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Propertyprovides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the bestselling author of For Common Things, a brilliant and ambitious rethinking of the meaning of property in democratic society In his latest book, Jedediah Purdy takes up a question of deep and lasting importance: why is property ownership a value to society? His answer returns us to the foundations of American society and enables us to interpret the writings of the patron saint of liberal economics, Adam Smith, in a wholly new light. Unlike Milton Friedman and other free-market scholars, who consider property a key to efficient markets, Purdy draws upon Smith’s theories to argue that the virtues of wealth are social rather than economic. In Purdy’s view, ownership does much more than shield one from government interference. Property shapes social life in ways that bring us closer to, or take us farther from, the ideal of a community of free and equal members. This view of property is neither libertarian nor communitarian but treats the community as the precondition of individual freedom. This view informed U.S. law in the early days of the republic, Purdy writes, and it is one that we need to restore today. Touching upon some of the most charged issues in American politics and law, including slavery, inheritance, international development, and climate change, The Meaning of Property offers a compelling new view of property and freedom and enriches our understanding of democratic society.