LPE Originals
Taking the Market Off Land: Symposium on Decommodifying Urban Property
Introducing a symposium on non-market approaches to governance over land and housing.
LPE Originals
“In a Good Economy Homelessness Goes Up”: Inflation and the Housing Question
By
David Stein
Shelter is one of the largest items in a person’s budget, and among the most rigid. How can the state ensure that renters don’t get crushed as workers during a recession, and then crushed again with housing costs as the economy recovers?
LPE Originals
Profiting from the Efforts of Others: Understanding Property-as-Capital
The annual ranking of the world’s richest highlights the often dramatic shifts, upwards and downwards, in the net wealth of elites. What do these fluctuations tell us about the nature of the things – the property – these elites own, and about the nature of property in contemporary capitalism?
LPE Originals
The Paradox of Property in the American Rule of Law
By
Paul Gowder
In the United States, the rule of law has always had property rights as its lodestar, with private property serving as the central legal interest that requires protection. Attending to our history reveals the dangers and paradoxical nature of this property-first conception of the rule of law.
LPE Originals
Seven Reactions to the Eviction Moratorium Decision
Last week, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden Administration’s most recent moratorium on evictions. The decision, along with an anemic federal rental assistance effort, has put millions of people at risk of being removed from their homes. To offer our readers different ways into this important ruling, we asked Amy Kapczynski, Nikolas Bowie, Tara…
LPE Originals
Jewishness as Property under Israeli Law
Understanding the law’s role in the project of Israeli colonization requires examining how distinct legal frameworks applied across a legally fragmented space can nevertheless share a common defining logic. One manifestation of this shared logic becomes evident by scrutinizing claims to land adjudicated by Israeli courts: Israeli state agencies and Jewish settler groups are treated as presumptively proper claimants of property while non-Jewish Palestinians are treated, at best, as dwellers who are not entitled to claim property but merely inhabit the land at the sufferance of Israeli authorities.
LPE Originals
The Case for Making Rent Disappear
To understand what’s at stake in the fight for rent cancellation, we first need to understand the significance of rent. In the US, rent is the vehicle for a wealth transfer from the poorest third of the population to a mere 7% of US residents and a relatively small number of corporate entities. The mom-and-pop landlords that make up that 7% face more precarity than their corporate counterparts, underlining the importance of COVID-19 mortgage cancellation. But many tenants live one paycheck away from homelessness, representing a far greater and more vulnerable segment of the population.
LPE Originals
Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually
The argument goes that cash benefits, such as UBI, afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that basic needs will be met. The context of housing provides one example of this. The reality of cash benefits is that even where choice is not restricted by the state, it remains restricted by the failures of the market.
LPE Originals
Liberal Property for Skeptics, Part 1
By
Hanoch Dagan
The first of a two-part response, in which Dagan responds to the concern that liberal property is self-destructive.
LPE Originals
Creating Space for Property’s Foes
By
Ezra Rosser
Liberalism as the “Mansion on the Hill”
LPE Originals
Property Without Autonomy
By
Lua Yuille
I want to suggest, however, that autonomy—even Dagan’s rehabilitated, communitarian conception of it—is a myth. Rather, the dependence and reliance (the vulnerability) against which autonomy is pitted is not pathogenic. It is not pathological. It is not an error to be fixed or a deficiency to be remedied.”
LPE Originals
Property, Collectivity, and Restraint
Dyal Chand’s concern is that Dagan’s vision does not ensure the level of collective restraint that will be required to pull us back from our current state of crisis. Some of the choices that Dagan argues should remain available to self-actualizing individuals, particularly those that allow for more individualized decision-making, may simply be unwise to keep available at a time when the pursuit of autonomy through property has produced serious collective harms.
LPE Originals
Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism
This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the…
LPE Originals
Property’s Contingent Categorization
Dagan’s theory of property provides a novel way to make sense of the puzzle of incorporating diversity within uniformity of property rights, but his approach fails to capture the deep pluralism of property.
LPE Originals
Liberalism, Property, and the Means of Production
In this post, we specifically consider liberal defenses of private property in the “means of production”. This focus allows us to put the liberal defense of private property into dialogue with Marxism, with which it shares a broad humanistic heritage and many particular normative framings. Our focus also connects liberal property theory with a variety of later critiques of private property in certain productive resources, including those of the progressive and realist lawyers who generated American doctrines concerning “public utility” and other modes of resource governance that are neither strictly “private property” nor strictly matters of state control.