Ownership Rights and the Rites of Ownership

Using condominium owner and landowner narratives about their property, I consider how people answer the question, What does it mean to own something? These property narratives are framed around three sets of social practices, myths, and beliefs which I call rites of identity, rites of settlement, and rites of struggle—the rites of ownership. According to these narratives, ownership requires that the person possessing the property carry out these rites. Their sense of entitlement—ownership rights—is framed by these rites. Following the rites makes one a deserving property owner. Property rights are seen as protectors against arbitrary, unpredictable changes in status that violate these owners, sense that they are entitled to keep what they had worked so hard for and planned for so long. I conclude with a discussion of the value of property narratives for understanding the link between law and culture.     

Distrust of Government, the Vigilante Tradition, and Support for Capital Punishment

This study probes the interconnections among distrust of government, the historical context, and public support for the death penalty in the United States with survey data for area-identified samples of white and black respondents. Multilevel statistical analyses indicate contrary effects of government distrust on support for the death penalty for blacks and whites, fostering death penalty support among whites and diminishing it among blacks. In addition, we find that the presence of a "vigilante tradition," as indicated by a history of lynching, promotes death penalty support among whites but not blacks. Finally, contrary to Zimring's argument in The Contradictions of Capital Punishment , we find no evidence that vigilantism moderates the influence of government distrust on support for the death penalty, for either whites or blacks. Our analyses highlight the continuing influence of historical context as well as contemporary conditions in the formation of public attitudes toward criminal punishment, and they underscore the importance of attending to racial differences in the analysis of punitive attitudes.