William and Mary's 13th annual Brigham-Kanner property rights conference will be this October 19-21 in the Hague. The honoree is Peruvian economist and public intellectual Hernando de Soto. The program is here. It looks absolutely outstanding and it includes four previous winners of the Brigham-Kanner prize: James Ely, James Krier, Thomas Merrill, and Carol Rose. Cribbing from the W&M announcement:
Hernando de Soto is the author of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic Books, 2000), The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism (Basic Books, 2002), which includes a new updated preface, "The Other Path after Ten Years," and Swiss Human Rights Book Volume 1: Realizing Property Rights (2006), co-authored with Francis Cheneval. He has received numerous international recognitions and honors, including, for example, the Adam Smith Award (Association of Private Enterprise Education), BearingPoint, Inc.-Forbes Magazine Compass Award for Strategic Direction, the CARE Canada Award for Outstanding Development Thinking,The Economist magazine’s Innovation Award, the Freedom Prize (Max Schmidheiny Foundation), and the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty (Cato Institute).
University of Toledo Dean Ben Barros, who edited a collection of essays on de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, will be pleased to see this I'm sure. (My contribution to that book was called "Hernando de Soto and the Histories of Property Law.") On a related note, back in 2009 I was fortunate to participate in the conference honoring Harvard historian Richard Pipes.
It now occurs to me that William and Mary's antebellum president Thomas Dew had a lot to say about the relationship of property, the market, and freedom -- and why property rights were so successful in the west in his posthumously published The Laws, Customs, Institutions, and Manners of Ancient and Modern Nations. Very soon I'll have more to say about Thomas Dew's ideas about property. But if you want to hear more about this right now, I have an article on him here.
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