Commodity & Propriety
Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970
1st Edition
Published on 15. April 2008
500 pages
978-0-226-01352-7 (ISBN)
Description
Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in Commodity and Propriety, the first full-length history of the meaning of property, Gregory Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as proprietary, a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. This view of property has even operated in periods-such as the second half of the nineteenth century-when market forces seemed to dominate social and legal relationships.In demonstrating how the understanding of property as a private basis for the public good has competed with the better-known market-oriented conception, Alexander radically rewrites the history of property, with significant implications for current political debates and recent Supreme Court decisions.
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Gregory S. Alexander
Commodity & Propriety
Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970
Book
06/1999
University of Chicago Press
€49.52
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Gregory S. Alexander
Commodity & Propriety
Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970
Book
02/1998
University of Chicago Press
€99.04
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Content
- Intro
- Commodity & Propriety
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One: The Civic Republican Culture,1776-1800
- Prologue: Legal Writing in the Civic Republican Era
- 1 Thomas Jefferson and the Civic Conception of Property
- 2 Time, History, and Property in the Republican Vision
- 3 Descent and Dissent from the Civic Meaning of Property
- Part Two: The Commercial Republican Culture, 1800-1860
- Prologue: Legal Writing in the Commercial Republican Era
- 4 "Liberality" vs. "Technicality": Statutory Revision of Land Law in the Jacksonian Age
- 5 James Kent and the Ambivalent Romance of Commerce
- 6 Antebellum Statutory Law Reform Revisited: The Married Women's Property Laws
- 7 Ambiguous Entrepreneurialism: The Rise and Fall of Vested Rights in the Antebellum Era
- 8 Commodifying Humans: Property in the Antebellum Legal Discourse of Slavery
- Part Three: The Industrial Culture, 1870-1917
- Prologue: Legal Writing in the Age of Enterprise
- 9 The Dilemma of Property in Public Law during the Age of Enterprise: Power and Democracy
- 10 The Dilemma of Property in the Private Sphere: Alienability and Paternalism
- Part Four: The Late Modern Culture, 1917-1970
- Prologue: Legal Writing in the Twentieth Century-The Demise of Legal Autonomy
- 11 Socializing Property: The Influence of Progressive-Realist Legal Thought
- 12 Property in the Welfdre State: Postwar Legal Thought, 1945-1970
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
