I'm pleased to announce that Jim Simth's new book, Property and Sovereignty: Legal and Cultural Perspectives is about to appear from Ashgate in their Law, Property, and Society series. Cribbing now from the book's website:
This book explores the relationships between property and the concept of sovereignty from a number of different perspectives. It distinguishes between the dual meaning of 'sovereignty' in property discourse - political sovereignty and owner sovereignty. The contributors discuss the nature of sovereignty in both senses, applying it to a wide range of topics such as the evolution of property rights in fragile and conflict-affected nation states, and notions of sovereign property in new worlds. A section on the Arts illuminates the relationships between property, sovereignty, and culture, and a further section investigates regulatory property and governmental control over resources. The book concludes with an exploration of sovereign shaping of private property entitlements to achieve instrumental ends.
This interesting collection will be valuable to those in the fields of legal philosophy, property theory, international and comparative law, and political sociology. This book explores the relationships between property and the concept of sovereignty from a number of different perspectives. It distinguishes between the dual meaning of ‘sovereignty’ in property discourse - political sovereignty and owner sovereignty. The contributors discuss the nature of sovereignty in both senses, applying it to a wide range of topics such as the evolution of property rights in fragile and conflict-affected nation states and notions of sovereign property in new worlds. A section on The Arts illuminates the relationships between property, sovereignty and culture and a further section investigates regulatory property and governmental control over resources. The book concludes with an exploration of sovereign shaping of private property entitlements to achieve instrumental ends.
The introduction is on-line, as is the table of contents. If this looks like it's of interest, I hope you'll pass this along to your library.
Anna Lineberger and I have a chapter in the book. It examines the prints in two pre-Civil War books, both titled American Scenery. There are about 120 prints total, which depict a wide range of American landscapes -- from New York City to the great plains. We're interested in how those prints reflect values of development of the land. While one might think that American landscape art would be of wild and uninhabited nature, the majority of the prints are of developed landscape -- such as cityscapes, bridges, and canals. We then link those images to the writings of American lawyers and judges that promote development of the land. We suggest that landscape art reflects the values of development of property that were so central to American law and government policy in the decades before Civil War. I have some parallel thoughts about this in "Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law."
The image is Descent into the Valley of Wyoming, which is one of the prints we use to illustrate our article.
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