Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime - for example by squatting - they enact what can be called 'contested property claims'. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.

Das Werk behandelt umfassend die praxisrelevanten Bereiche des Leasingrechts. Dem Praktiker wird ermoeglicht, Loesungsansatze fur samtliche Problemkreise des Leasingrechts - von der Vertragsgestaltung bis zur Abwicklung der Zwangsvollstreckung - zu entwickeln. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt der geanderten Rechtslage beim Verbraucherleasing sowie der neuesten hoechstrichterlichen Rechtsprechung, die bedeutsame AEnderungen fur die Leasingpraxis nach sich ziehen. Leseprobe oeffnen

A straightforward description providing readers with a guide to contract law as it relates to construction contracting. Thoroughly explains when a lawyer may or may not be needed and offers guidance for working with one. Prior notice provisions, no damage for delay clauses and conditional payment provisions are among the topics covered. Includes hundreds of actual construction cases.

The only modern guide to interpreting and writing real property descriptions for surveyors

Technical land information is no longer the exclusive domain of professional surveyors. The Internet now houses a multitude of resources that nontechnical professionals--such as attorneys and realtors--access and implement on a daily basis. However, these professionals are trained in aspects of law and commerce that do not provide the proper education and experience to interpret and evaluate their land boundary information discoveries correctly. As a result, their analysis is often erroneous and the data misapplied--ultimately leading to confusion and costly litigation.

Professional Surveyors and Real Property Descriptions attempts to bridge the ever-widening gap between the users of land boundary information and the land surveyors who produce it. An expert team of authors integrates the historic and legal background of real property interests with fundamental concepts of the surveying profession in a manner accessible for average readers. These provide the basics for both properly comprehending older descriptions and competently constructing complete and modern real property descriptions that foster better communication. Highlights in this book include:

An in-depth exploration of historic descriptions and how to read them

Coverage of the widely accepted ALTA/ACSM Land Boundary Survey standards and associated property descriptions

A diverse collection of examples and practice scenarios

An overview of the latest issues related to the use of GPS and GIS

Written in easy-to-understand language, this practical resource assists nontechnical professionals in understanding exactly what a surveyor does and does not do, and serves as a valuable tool for obtaining the most satisfactory, accurate, and complete real property descriptions.

This work is an assessment of how to manage risk in property transactions in the context of the move from paper-based to electronic conveyancing (eConveyancing). In particular the focus is on risks that impact on title registration, and the security, protection or lack thereof that this registration offers to land owners, third parties and property claimants. The impact is the extent to which a change in the transactional process may unintentionally affect risk (being the consequence of change and the likelihood of that consequence having a negative effect). The risks are identified, analysed and evaluated against the backdrop of title registration and the development of eConveyancing through a comparative analysis of the systems in Ireland and Ontario, while also referencing other developing electronic systems around the globe.

Property Rights and Social Justice analyses 'progressive property' in action by examining the role of constitutional property rights guarantees in mediating private ownership and social justice. It combines insights from property theory with enlightening doctrinal analysis of the interaction between property rights and social justice in the constitutional and broader legal context. It does so through the prism of the Irish Constitution's property guarantees, which uniquely in the English-speaking, common law world both protect property rights and requires their regulation by the State to secure social justice. Through this analysis, the book grounds key debates in contemporary property theory in fresh, illuminating doctrinal examples, and enhances global debates about the constitutional protection of property rights. It argues that primacy is perhaps inevitably afforded to political determinations about the appropriate mediation of property rights and social justice, meaning that the political impact of constitutionalisation needs to be disentangled from its strict legal effects.

A Study of Mixed Legal Systems: Endangered, Entrenched, or Blended takes the reader on a fascinating voyage of discovery. It includes case studies of a number of systems from across the globe: Cyprus, Guyana, Jersey, Mauritius, Philippines, Quebec, St Lucia, Scotland, and Seychelles. Each combines its legal legacies in novel ways. Large and small, in Europe and beyond, some are sovereign, some part of larger political units. Some are monolingual, some bilingual, some multilingual. Along with an analytical introduction and conclusion, the chapters explore the manner in which the elements of these mixed systems may be seen to be 'entrenched', 'endangered', or 'blended'. It explores how this process of legal change happens, questions whether some systems are at greater risk than others, and details the strategies that have been adopted to accelerate or counteract change. The studies involve consideration of the colourful histories of the jurisdictions, of their complex relationships to parent legal systems and traditions, and of language, legal education and legal actors. The volume also considers whether the experiences of these systems can tell us something about legal mixtures and movements generally. Indeed, the volume will be helpful both for scholars and students with a special interest in mixed legal systems as well as anyone interested in comparative law and legal history, in the diversity and dynamism of law.

This book deals with the historic transition to democracy in South Africa and its impact upon crime and punishment. It examines how the problem of crime has emerged as a major issue to be governed in post-apartheid South Africa. Having undergone a dramatic transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from a white minority to black majority government, South Africa provides rich material on the role that political authority, and challenges to it, play in the construction of crime and criminality. As such, the study is about the socio-cultural and political significance of crime and punishment in the context of a change of regime. The work uses the South African case study to examine a question of wider interest, namely the politics of punishment and race in neoliberalizing regimes. It provides interesting and illuminating empirical material to the broader debate on crime control in post-welfare/neoliberalizing/post transition polities.

The community land trust is an innovative form of tenure that combines common ownership of land with individual ownership of any buildings that are located upon that land. It first appeared in the United States forty years ago. An outgrowth of the southern Civil Rights Movement, the community land trust (CLT) was conceived originally as a mechanism for African-American farmers to gain access to agricultural land. It soon found many other uses, including affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. It soon spread to urban, suburban, and rural communities throughout the country. There are now over 200 CLTs in 44 states and the District of Columbia. They are appearing in other countries as well, with CLTs being developed in Canada, England, Scotland, and Australia.
The Community Land Trust Reader brings together for the first time the seminal texts that inspired and defined the CLT. Selections trace the intellectual origins of an eclectic model of tenure that was shaped by the social theories of Henry George, Ebenezer Howard, Ralph Borsodi, and Arthur Morgan and by social experiments like the Garden Cities of England and the Gramdan villages of India. The Reader does not look only to the past, however. Many of its 46 essays and excerpts examine contemporary applications of the CLT in promoting homeownership, spurring community development, protecting public investment, and capturing land gains for the common good. The Reader also looks ahead to challenges and opportunities likely to affect the future development of CLTs, here and abroad.

Land is important to all aspects of human life and has a key role in the economic well-being of society therefore, land tenure, land ownership, and real property law is a critical part of any developed nation. Together, the processes of how land parcels are held; how they are defined, measured, and described to allow economic transactions; how they are marked to allow their use and defense; and how they are legally protected have allowed for the orderly possession and use of land. In doing so, these processes have also provided the basis for the advanced economy of most developed nations. Very often, these processes-land tenure, boundary surveying, and cadastral systems-are considered separately. They are very much interrelated, and none of these processes may be completely understood without an understanding of the others. Land Tenure, Boundary Surveys, and Cadastral Systems provides an introduction to land tenure, cadastral systems, and boundary surveying, including an understanding of the interrelationship of these areas and their role in land tenure and real property law. This is especially true considering the advent of georeferenced cadastral maps reflecting the location of land parcels relative to many other components of the physical and legal infrastructure. Although intended as a basic text for college-level surveying courses, this book should also be of significant value to cadastral mappers, real property attorneys, land title professionals, and others involved with land transactions.

Regulating Law explores how the goals and policies of the new regulatory state are fundamentally reshaping jurisprudence in the domains of public law, private law, and the regulation of work and business. Fourteen areas of the core legal curriculum are reassessed from the standpoint of the impact of regulation on mainstream legal doctrine. The volume examines the collision of regulation by law with regulation by other means and provides an innovative regulatory perspective for the whole of law. To date, regulatory scholarship has mainly been applied to specific legislative programs and/or agencies for the social and economic regulation of business. In this volume, a cast of internationally renowned legal scholars each apply a 'regulatory perspective' to their own area of law. Their contributions provide a rich analysis of the limits and potential of legal doctrine as an instrument of control both in regulatory settings, and in settings traditionally immune from regulatory analysis. The result is an examination of the regulation of the doctrines of law itself, and of the way in which law regulates other forms of regulation and social ordering- law as subject and object of regulation.

Whale oil lit the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. In light of its importance, competition between whalers was high. Far from courts and law enforcement, competing crews of American whalers not known for their gentility and armed with harpoons tended to resolve disputes at sea over ownership of whales. Left to settle arguments on their own, whalemen created norms and customs to decide ownership of whales pursued by multiple crews. The Law of the Whale Hunt provides an innovative examination of how property law was created in the absence of formal legal institutions regulating the American whaling industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using depositions, court testimony, logbooks, and other previously unused primary sources, Robert Deal tells an exciting story of American whalers hunting in waters from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk.

Learn to be a good investigator and a successful retracement surveyor
In the era of CSI, forensic science has taken on an unaccustomed glamor. The fact is, forensic science plays as crucial a role in the field of land surveying and title investigation as it does in flesh-and-blood criminology. Land location, the stability of property lines, and the sanctity of title documents are of utmost interest to the legal system in general, and the court system in particular.
Forensic Procedures for Boundary and Title Investigation is the first book to present the application of investigative forensic techniques to the field of land boundary retracement. Covering basic logic, document research, and the interpretation of physical evidence on site, Forensic Procedures for Boundary and Title Investigation is an indispensable guide for?surveyors faced with a difficult retracement having little or faulty evidence.
Demonstrating the techniques that can be applied to boundary location, this fascinating and useful introduction to forensic science:
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Covers basic logic with tips for avoiding assumptions during the investigation that might result in error and bad conclusions
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Explains the standard operating procedures, common to all forensics fields, for the protection of scenes, evidence collection, and photography
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Provides detailed information on records research, reconstructing historical documentation, dealing with damaged documentation, and interpreting historic records containing antiquated measurements and wording
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Includes a unique presentation of physical evidence investigation techniques including interpreting stone, wood, and metal evidence found on site
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Takes an international approach, presenting universal investigative techniques and methods beyond the specifics of any single country
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Includes advice on using the Internet for research and how to draw upon surprising sources of historic information such as postcards, advertisements, and family histories

This extensive treatment is sure to become a standard reference work for professionals in many fields related to land investigation as well as a practical text for the training of investigators in the evidence recovery and interpretative processes leading to successful property location and ownership.

This book explores the relationship between space, subjectivity, and property in order to invert conventional socio-legal understandings of property. Moreover, Sarah Keenan demonstrates that new political possibilities for property may be unveiled by thinking about property in terms of space and belonging, rather than exclusion. Drawing on feminist and critical race theory, this book shifts focus away from the propertied subject and onto the broader spaces in and through which the propertied subject is located. Using case studies, such as analyses of compulsory leases under Australia's Northern Territory Intervention and lesbian asylum cases from a range of jurisdictions, Keenan argues that these spaces consist of networks of relations that revolve around belonging: not just belonging between subject and object, as property is traditionally understood, but also the less explored relation of belonging between the part and the whole. This book therefore offers a conceptually useful way of analysing a wide range of socio-legal issues. It will therefore be of relevance to those working in the area of property and legal geography, but also to those with more general interests in socio-legal studies, social and political theory, postcolonial studies, critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies.

When governments use eminent domain to transfer property between private owners, Americans are outraged-or so most media and academic accounts would have us believe. But these accounts obscure a much more complex reality in American conceptions of property. In this book, Debbie Becher presents the first comprehensive study of a city's eminent domain acquisitions, exploring how and why the City of Philadelphia took properties between 1992 and 2007 and which takings led to protests. She uses original data-collected from city offices and interviews with over a hundred residents, business owners, community leaders, government representatives, attorneys, and appraisers-to explore how eminent domain really works. Becher surprises readers by finding that the city took over 4,000 private properties, or one out of every hundred such properties in Philadelphia, during her study period. Furthermore, these takings only rarely provoked opposition-a fact that established views on property are ill-equipped to explain. To investigate how Americans judge the legitimacy of eminent domain, Becher devotes several chapters to two highly controversial sets of takings for redevelopment projects. The American Street takings were intended to win popular support for redevelopment and initially succeeded in doing so, but it ended as a near total failure and embarrassment. The Jefferson Square takings initially faced vociferous opposition, but they eventually earned residents' approval and became a political showpiece. Becher uncovers evidence that Americans judge eminent domain through a social conception of property as an investment of value, committed over time, that government is responsible for protecting. This conception has never been described in sociological, legal, political, or economic scholarship, and it stands in stark contrast to the arguments of libertarian and left-leaning activists and academics. But recognizing property as investment, Becher argues, may offer a firm new foundation for more progressive urban policies.

This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples - a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim. Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.

Why does America have a love affair with homeownership? For many, buying a home is no longer in their best interest and may actually harm their children's educational opportunities. This book argues that U.S. leaders need to reevaluate all housing policies and develop new ones that ensure that all Americans have greater access to affordable housing whether rented or owned. After describing homeownership's most common myths, the book shows why the financial circumstances America's financial underclass now face make it impossible for them to benefit from homeownership because they cannot afford to buy homes. The book then exposes the risks of home buying while brown or black by discussing U.S. policies that made it easier for whites to buy homes easily and cheaply, but harder and more costly for blacks and Latinos to do so. The book argues that remaining traces of racial discrimination and certain demographic features continue to make it harder for blacks and Latinos to receive homeownership's promised benefits."

This monograph is concerned with two foundational principles of English property law: the principle of relativity of title and the principle that possession is a source of title. It is impossible to understand the relationship between possession and ownership in English law unless one has a sound understanding of these principles. Yet the principles have been interpreted in different ways by judges, practitioners, and academics. The volume seeks to illuminate this area of law by addressing four questions. What is possession? What is the nature of the title acquired through possession? What are the grounds of relativity of title? And, what is the relationship between relativity of title and ownership? Drawing on the analysis of the law concerning relativity of title and the acquisition of proprietary interests through possession, the author also implies that the architecture of land law and the law of personal property have many similarities.

'A delicious book.' Jared Diamond Who controls the space around an aeroplane seat: you or the person behind you trying to work on their laptop? Who owns your favourite football player? And why do Facebook and Google want your private data? In Mine! Michael Heller and James Salzman reveal the hidden economic and social rules that guide everyday life, demonstrating that much of what we assume about ownership is wrong. Whether a lost wallet, a playground swing or a London flat, Mine! explores what ownership means and why it governs everything we do.

This book constitutes Volume II of a set of two Volumes. Volume II considers the possibility of a new, sustainable land relations policy for Southern African Development Community States (SADC) that are currently mired up in land disputes that have become subject of domestic, regional and international tribunals, including the SADC Tribunal and the Washington based International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). It shows that land relations in the SADC have always been, and will perhaps remain a matter for constitutional regulation. Because constitutional laws defer to no other laws except by constitutional design, legal contests appear to be the least likely means by which these disputes will eventually be settled in the sub-region. Only human rights inspired policies that respond to the call for social justice by acknowledging both the current and the underlying contexts to the disputes, and also to the developmental aspirations of these States hold the most potential to resolve these disputes. The book recommends efficient pedagogical counter-apartheid-rule psychological distortions regarding the significance of human dignity (PECAPDISH) as a pre-requisite and corollary to the dismantling of the salient physical legacy of apartheid-rule in affected SADC States. The book shows that PECAPDISH's potential and benefits would be enormous.

This book constitutes Volume I of a set of two Volumes. Volume I attempts a holistic inter-disciplinary evaluation of the legitimacy of colonial and emergent post-colonial rule property rights in affected States of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in light of intensifying litigation in national courts, the SADC Tribunal, and more recently the Washington based International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) regarding counter claims to title to property. Cultural, economic and political drivers at the core of SADC land issues are examined for their significance and potential to contribute to the discovery of a new, sustainable land relations policy that guarantees social justice in the distribution of all the advantages and disadvantages relating to the allocation and use of land. The book shows that persistent systematic administrative failures by pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial authorities have made for a very complex challenge that requires Solomonic tools that neither the Courts alone, nor human rights centric morality alone could resolutely attend. Therefore, the book recommends a sophisticated systematic new approach to SADC land issues. That approach is developed in Volume II of this series: Re-conceiving Property Rights in the new millennium - Towards a New Sustainable Land Relations Policy.

Religion, Law, and the Present Water Crisis documents current and impending global water shortages and opposes policies of commodification and privatization of water ownership by multinational water corporations. On the basis of the religions of the world, Richard A. Hughes appeals to pure, running water as a symbol of the sacred. Furthermore, he argues that all bodies of freshwater are commons and that they should be protected by the public trust doctrine. In addition, he contends that there is a right to water and that this right is independent, free-standing, and the prerequisite of other human rights, applying to all states and occupied territories. The increasing acidification of the oceans makes it mandatory to protect them under the reserved water right doctrine and to designate them as "national parks" of the seas. More generally, this book presents a synthesis of water studies and encompasses the religions of the world, theologies of baptism, American water law doctrines, public trust doctrine with special attention to Islamic water law, and international water law treaties. Clean water is a necessity of life. Therefore, it is compelling to recognize the urgency of water scarcity and the need to guarantee the purity of and accessibility to water for all people.

This book provides a thorough introduction to Roman property law by means of "cases," consisting of brief excerpts from Roman juristic sources in the original Latin with accompanying English translations. The cases are selected and grouped so as to provide an overview of each topic and an orderly exposition of its parts. To each case is attached a set of questions that invite the reader to, e.g., clarify ambiguities in the jurist's argument, reconcile one holding with another, supply missing but necessary facts to account for the holding, and/or engage in other analytical activities. The casebook also illustrates the survival and adaptation of elements of Roman property law in the modern European civil codes, especially the three most influential of those codes: the General Civil Code of Austria (Allgemeines Burgerliches Gesetzbuch), the German Civil Code (Burgerliches Gesetzbuch), and the Civil Code of Switzerland (Zivilgesetzbuch). All code excerpts are accompanied by English translations. By comparing and contrasting how the codes have adopted, adapted, or rejected an underlying Roman rule or concept, it is possible for the reader to observe the dynamic character and continuing life of the Roman legal tradition. To facilitate comparison with corresponding rules and concepts in the English common law tradition, additional texts and questions prepared by the translator will be mounted on an accompanying website, www.oup.com/us/romanpropertylaw."