Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal's Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership has been at the top of my discretionary reading pile for months, now ever since the publisher, Yale, sent me a review copy. Unfortunately, it's been months since I've done any substantial discretionary reading and it'll be months still before I get to do so. So yesterday, I just carved out 45 minutes to give it a good, thorough skim, and while I don't have enough of the book in me to do an actual review, I can tell you that my suspicions were confirmed.
Property Outlaws is a great and deep read on how the violation of property rights -- from trespassing to sit-ins to copyright infringement -- have been critical to the evolution of "the law of ownership," establishing the principles that led to anti-discrimination laws (lunch-counter sit-ins), justice for indigenous people (Indian occupation of Alcatraz) and the many shifts and turns in copyright that accommodate speech, privacy, and free expression.
Katyal and Penalver go at the subject with academic thoroughness (both are academic lawyers), but without ever being dry. This is an important book -- important enough that I'm putting it back in the stack so that I get a chance to read it cover to cover someday.
We've featured Katyal's work here before, Copyright, Technology, and The New Surveillance is a great paper on privacy and copyright enforcement that's a must-read.
Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership
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15 Comments • Add a comment
Sounds like a good read, but $40.50 on Amazon? Is this a college textbook? Why is it so expensive? Do they want people to pirate it?
"A thorough skim" made me LOL. Reminded me of the "detailed overview" I sometimes see asked for at work. Mind you, at $40 perhaps a detailed summary is all we can afford.
Throughout history, liberty has been advanced by putting limits on property rights (the lunch counter sit-ins you cite, for example). That's why those who seek to elevate property rights over all other rights should be called propertarians, not libertarians: they stand for giving all power to the "haves".
That's why we have the following in our consitution:
Anyone who feels good about squatters rights should read about this infuriating situation in Boulder, Colorado:
http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_7501264
That article is about an abuse of power by a well-connected individual.
Adverse possession laws (squatters rights) are inherited from English common law to ensure that land is not wasted by those who can afford a ton of it.
Anyone who doesn't realize that good laws can be put to bad ends probably hasn't been reading boing-boing very long.
@Jupiter12
If you step back and think about that story a little bit critically, you'll surely see that there's another interpretation. The couple bought and held the land, doing nothing with it and preventing anyone else from developing it either.
Cities cannot function if people are allowed to pull land out of active use.
At least for copyright laws, the problem is that they rest on illegitimate notion of "property".
So-called intellectual property is not actually property, in the sense of property rights.
I too, am glad to see them broken widely, especially on the internet, as it brings up the question of their legitimacy to the public scene.
That said, I won't be reading the book. 40$ paperback and 36$ for the Kindle edition!
What is this "our constitution"? It certainly doesn't say that in the U.S. constitution.
If I remember correctly, Peter is from Germany, so, no, he's not talking about the U.S. constitution. Am I right, Peter?
High cancer rates increase medical knowledge of the disease. Will their next book be extolling the virtues of getting cancer?
Property and many other rights are fictions we define for our own benefit and convenience; they are and should be negotiable. The basic premise applies to all areas of law. The powerful work constantly to break down restraints on them either by lobbying to change them or by simply exceeding them, often succeeding in circumventing or dismantling needed regulation or enforcement agencies, or walking away with slapped hands and big bonuses. Of course they're all in favor of training the "little" people to be obedient to authority (heaven forbid that starving hurricane victims should steal a loaf of bread!) We little people vastly outnumber the powerful; if only more of us would wake up!
Err, yes. I always kinda forget that people have different defaults for "our" :-)
I hope no one thinks I disagree with the ideas of this book, however I just it necessary to point out that if absolutely everybody broke the laws, it would be as detrimental to society as a whole as everybody following the laws stringently. Extremes are the issue. And I believe that people should understand that noting the historical significance of something does not advocate it as doctrine for all to follow. While I agree that the testing of boundaries in the legal setting is the only way to better define and defend our freedoms, I would be very hesitant to advocate the breaking of property law in general.
Because piracy in particular is so new, I think it is one area of law which needs to be further developed.
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