Many libertarians ground their theory of justice in a non-aggression principle. The NAP is often the basis for the libertarian condemnation of state action – that it is necessarily aggressive and therefore unjust. This approach is often criticised insofar as it defines aggression, in part, as the violation of legitimate property rights, and is therefore parasitical upon a prior – and unjustified – theory of property. While it is true that libertarians who defend the NAP sometimes fail to give a (...) satisfactory account of its relationship to libertarian property rights, such an account is in fact available. A commitment to property rights and to non-aggression can both be grounded in a commitment to non-interference. Such a principle, then, brings together the NAP and the theory of property it is parasitical upon, thus saving the unity and austerity of the overall approach. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for conceptualizing news as a contested commodity. It offers an unprecedented application of commodification theory to the problem of the sustainability of a free press in a democracy. When the news media are expected to be purveyors of the public interest while pursuing profits for their corporate owners, the result often is a clash of capitalist and journalistic imperatives. The amoral values of the market system conflict with the moral agency of a free press, and (...) the two are inherently incompatible. This study presents a synthesis of otherwise divergent theoretical perspectives to examine the free press-free market paradox from a new vista. The author concludes regulatory reforms are needed to insulate the press from the predatory expansion of a free market system that permeates every aspect of social life, including the production of news. “American mainstream media have become the watchdog and guardian of the corporate bottom line instead of the vanguard of democracy and the public interest…. Driven by profit maximization … Instead of protecting against abuses of government power by keeping the public adequately informed, they have become complicit in destabilizing and undermining American democracy.” —Elliot D. Cohen (2005a, p. 17). (shrink)

This article challenges the long-standing boundary that separates human beings from non-human entities, whether animate or inanimate. In doing so, it engages with the jurisprudential strands that debate the transformative power of law in moving towards a fuller recognition of human relations with non-human entities. To this end, the article first examines the legal theoretical strategies that scholars have so far developed to overcome the dichotomous vision that pits humans against non-humans. It then argues for a new model of understanding (...) property, called cont(r)actualisation, which seeks to reconfigure existing strategies. It makes the case that the legal categories of person and object should be brought together under the overarching heading of ‘legal entity’. Rather than being built around humans as persons/subjects and non-human entities as objects/objects, law should be built around the contingent points of contact between particular entities in a particular web of relations. In this way, the article advances a view that does justice to how these entities contribute to what human beings are and do. (shrink)

This essay reviews six different approaches to intellectual property. It and argues that none of these accounts provide an adequate justification of intellectual property laws and policies because (1) there are many different types of intellectual property, and (2) a variety of incommensurable values play a role in the justification of intellectual property. The best approach to intellectual property is to assess and balance competing moral values in light of the particular facts and circumstances.

This review essay contains four parts. The first briefly recounts the contours of Rafe Blaufarb’s thesis in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property. The review is not intended to be a full assessment of the book; rather, Blaufarb’s work sets the stage for the focus of my reflections, which begin in Part 3. Using Louis Althusser’s understanding of law, we can see how the demarcation identified by Blaufarb made possible a further deployment of bourgeois (...) law, which perpetuates the dominant ideology ensuring the concentration of resources in a small number of people, seemingly without obligation to the great majority who hold no power in relation to any resources. Part 4 explains the true inequity which this demarcation has wrought, establishing and perpetuating deep divisions between those who hold the ‘social function’ inherent in property—the power unilaterally to alter social relationships—and those who do not—those who suffer the alteration of social relationships to their detriment. In short, property itself is an ideology of power, the legacy of which is not equality, but exploitation. Part 5 concludes that the great demarcation, which Blaufarb so skilfully explicates, turns out to be nothing in which humankind ought to take any pride. Rather, it has served and serves the purposes of the few to work untold misery and hardship upon the many. (shrink)

Today, the improper is not only a philosophical issue; it is also a political question. In particular, striving to abandon the improper is central to the contemporary political agenda in many Western countries. Given the risks of a political agenda abandoning the improper in a proper way and realizing a “closed community,” contemporary philosophers such as Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy have thought about the relationship between the proper and improper. It is remarkable that Martin Heidegger is an exemplary figure (...) in the analyses of both philosophers. I will analyze Heidegger's line of thought on this issue and how Esposito and Nancy have responded to it. Both Esposito and Nancy state that it is “impossible to abandon the improper in a proper way” in their writings on community. Every proper existence is always marked by impropriety, Nancy and Esposito argue; there is no “original” or “proper” commonality that would liberate us from all things improper. Even before one can appropriate one's property, it is already traversed by the improper. The question “how not to abandon properly the improper?” is in fact one of the imperatives behind their arguments: if indeed the proper is always already, in one way or another, related to or contaminated by the improper, it is indeed an illusion to think we can simply leave the improper behind. (shrink)

This article offers three reflections on the nature of the metaphysical ‘wall’ erected between the ‘Included’ and the ‘Excluded/Other’ by the concept of private property and its implementation in a state’s legal apparatus. The first reflection explores the reality of the concept of private property, using Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology, in order to demonstrate that the liberal conception of private property masks power operating on two levels: the formal, repressive state apparatus, and the deeper, the personal, the real, the (...) actual level, which allows the Included to act upon ego in ways that negatively affect the Excluded/Other found in the ideological state apparatus. The second argues that the masked power that is private property permits war to be waged by the Included as against the Excluded/Other at two levels: intra-state and inter-state. This reveals a paradox in the distinction between Included and Excluded/Other: while the distinction demonstrates the allocation of power over resources, the reality is that every individual on earth is both Included and Excluded/Other. The final reflection briefly considers what could replace private property as a means of allocating goods and resources within a society. (shrink)

This paper explores conservative Christian demands that religious-based objections to providing services to lesbians and gay men should be accommodated by employers and public bodies. Focusing on a series of court judgments, alongside commentators’ critical accounts, the paper explores the dominant interpretation of the conflict as one involving two groups with deeply held, competing interests, and suggests this interpretation can be understood through a social property framework. The paper explores how religious beliefs and sexual orientation are attachments whose power has (...) been unsettled by equality law. But entangled with this property is another—that held in workers’ labour and public bodies’ resources. Arguing against the drive to balance competing interests, the paper uses social property to illuminate the agonistic character of the stakes. At the same time, it questions property as a normative framework for sexual orientation and religious beliefs. (shrink)

Many theorists have charted for some time how capital extends its lines of flight into new spaces, creating new markets by harnessing affect and intervening in intimate, emotional and domestic relationships, and into bio-politics more generally. Feminists have known for a long time that women’s ‘domestic’ labour has been central to the reproduction of capital but that it has been made invisible, surplus and naturalised and is rarely taken into account in theories of value. Yet we are now in a (...) bizarre historical moment wherein a format has emerged (reality television) in a major capitalist industry (the media) that is premised upon spectacularly visualising women’s labour in all its forms, especially through its focus on relationships, dispositions and emotional performance. Drawing on an ESRC research project, ‘Making Class and the Self through Mediated Ethical Scenarios’, this paper demonstrates how very different spheres of exchange—economy and affect—have come together, offering possibilities for fusing calculation and care. This process bears remarkable similarity to the legal adjudication of property and propriety in intimate relationships. Yet the paper shows how, as attempts are made to commodify affect, it is precisely affect that exposes and disrupts exchange and enables reality television as a technology of affect to visualise the different types of person-value that are constituted through class and gender relations. (shrink)

This article redescribes early modern European defenses of private property in terms of a theoretical project of seeking to establish the true or essential nature of property. Most of the scholarly literature has focused on the historical and normative issues relating to the various accounts of original acquisition around which these defenses were organized. However, in my redescription, these so-called “original acquisition stories” appear as methodological devices for an analytic reduction and resolution of property into its fundamental elements and axioms. (...) Through these stories, property is “created” in the form of the classical liberal paradigm of presumptively exclusive, private ownership of material things. The problem is that this project of “creation” is also a project which arbitrarily excludes or marginalizes other forms and systems of property, and especially usufructuary forms of common property. After critically explicating this early modern project of creation, I go on to argue that the classical liberal paradigm and its problems continue to inform property theory and discourse in the late modern era. (shrink)

Relatively little has been written on the connection between property and emotions from a legal perspective, despite the centrality of property in everyday life and the complex relationships that exist between owners and their property. Scholars working in other disciplines have analyzed these links, identifying “proprietary” emotions and corresponding emotional traits. However, little has been mapped onto the field of law. This article looks at key emotions surrounding property as identified in psychological and, to a lesser extent, sociological literature. After (...) mapping these onto selected areas of property law, it posits the need for a deeper and more collective field of inquiry. (shrink)

The growing scope of gamete donation and themanipulation of gametes makes it essential to developa coherent theory of the nature of gametes and theclaims which may be made in relation to them. Thenature of gametes is ambiguous, they blur thedistinctions between persons and property, but thecurrent legal framework which governs gamete donationand manipulation fails to address their status. Thisleaves unanswered fundamentally important questionsabout control of processes involving gametes andrights to use or control the gametes themselves andthe information which they represent. (...) These areclaims which are rooted in the concept ofproperty. A property based analysis highlights thethemes of autonomy, personhood and control which lieat the heart of the claims made in relation to gametesand an account based on the notion of property forpersonhood offers a more coherent justification forrecognising claims in gametes and mediating disputes. This perspective exposes the inadequacies andinconsistencies of the legal construction of gametesand the legal regulation of gamete donation. Thepresent legal framework has not sought to develop acoherent construction of gametes, but to constrain thepractices of the assisted reproductive technologies(including gamete donation) within a framework whichis presented as least damaging to the traditionalideologies of the creation of the family. (shrink)