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In America, we are eager to claim ownership: our homes, our ideas, our organs, even our own celebrity. But beneath our nation’s proprietary longing looms a troublesome question: what does it mean to own something? More simply: what is property? The question is at the heart of many contemporary controversies, including disputes over who owns everything from genetic material to indigenous culture to music and film on the Internet. To decide if and when genes or culture or digits are a kind of property that can be possessed, we must grapple with the nature of property itself. How does it originate? What purposes does it serve? Is it a natural right or one created by law? Accessible and mercifully free of legal jargon, American Property reveals the perpetual challenge of answering these questions, as new forms of property have emerged in response to technological and cultural change, and as ideas about the appropriate scope of government regulation have shifted. This first comprehensive history of property in the United States is a masterly guided tour through a contested human institution that touches all aspects of our lives and desires. Stuart Banner shows that property exists to serve a broad set of purposes, constantly in flux, that render the idea of property itself inconstant. Despite our ideals of ownership, property has always been a means toward other ends. What property signifies and what property is, we come to see, has consistently changed to match the world we want to acquire.
In this concise history of expropriation of land for the common good in Europe and North America from medieval times to 1800, Susan Reynolds contextualizes the history of an important legal doctrine regarding the relationship between government and the in
Georgia Land Surveying History and Law is the first definitive history and analysis of Georgia’s land system and the laws that govern it. The book’s opening section tells the story of the surveyor’s role in transforming Georgia from a frontier to a bounded, populated, and productive colony and state. Paced by anecdotes of surveyors’ wilderness experiences, the narrative traces the evolution of Georgia’s land subdivision system, beginning with the original, and ultimately impractical, scheme of land granting and rectangular land subdivision under the Trustees of the Georgia Colony. The volume then covers the more flexible but easily abused headright procedure, and the subsequent lottery and succession of systematic, rectangular surveys under which most of the state was laid out and granted in the early nineteenth century. Finally, in lay terms supported by meticulous citation of authority, the volume discusses the legal aspects of land surveying, including the interests that make up land ownership, the transfer of real property, the interpretation of property descriptions, the location of boundaries, riparian and littoral rights, and other topics. The book examines every point concerning boundaries found in any Georgia case or statute. Based solidly on primary sources and the author’s fifteen years of experience in land surveying and title abstracting, Georgia Land Surveying History and Law is an exhaustively researched and scholarly reference that will be useful to surveyors, title attorneys, title abstractors, real estate professionals, geographers, cartographers, historians, and genealogists.
Can private law assume an ecological meaning? Can property and contract defend nature? Is tort law an adequate tool for paying environmental damages to future generations? This book explores potential resolutions to these questions, analyzing the evolution of legal thinking in relation to the topics of legal personality, property, contract and tort. In this forward thinking book, Mattei and Quarta suggest a list of basic principles upon which a new, ecological legal system could be based. Taking private law to represent an ally in the defence of our future, they offer a clear characterization of the fundamental legal institutions of common law and civil law, considering the challenges of the Anthropogenic era, technological tools of the Internet era, and the global rise of the commons. Summarizing the fundamental institutions of private law: property rights, legal personality, contract, and tort, the authors reveal the limits of these legal institutions in relation to historical international evolution and their regulation in the contexts of catastrophic ecological issues and technological developments. Engaging and thoughtful, this book will be interesting reading for legal scholars and academics of private law and, in particular, those wishing to understand the role of law when facing technological and ecological challenges.
In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.
Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance under which--had they prevailed--40 percent of English land would have been inherited or held by women. Current ideas of family development portray female inheritance as increasing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Spring argues that this is a misperception, resulting from an incomplete consideration of the common-law rules. Female rights actually declined, reaching their nadir in the eighteenth century. Spring shows that there was a centuries-long conflict between male and female heirs, a conflict that has not been adequately recognized until now.
New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Women and the Law of Property in Early America