Title by Registration: Instituting Modern Property Law and Creating Racial Value in the Settler Colony

The transformation in prevailing conceptualizations of property and the drive to render land as fungible as possible, the desire to commoditize land that had been pursued in earnest since the seventeenth century in England, was realized in the space of the settler colony decades before it would be implemented in the United Kingdom. The author explores how the commodity logic of abstraction that subtended new property logics during this time, reflected in the Torrens system of title by registration, was accompanied by a racial logic of abstraction that rendered the land of the Native, or Savage vacant and ripe for appropriation. By way of conclusion, the author speculates on the ways in which the imposition of English property law in the settler colony influenced the development of modern property law in England.     

Opening Up Ownership: Community Belonging, Belongings, and the Productive Life of Property

Drawing on empirical data and property theory, this article explores the property structure of a "free school" and the work property performs there. At Summerhill, we can see a tension between two property registers. On the one hand, the founder and present members stress the importance of individual ownership; at the same time the school's property regime involves property-limitation rules, a dispersal of rights, collective forms of property, and cross-cutting, pluralized sites of institutional recognition. In exploring how this tension is manifested through property's work, the article focuses on property's contribution to a variegated social life at the school, analyzed in terms of personal, civic, and boundary relations. With belonging treated as the central component of property rather than exclusion or control, ways of understanding what constitutes property and how it works shift.     

Post-Separation Contact and Domestic Violence: our 7-Point Plan for Safe[r] Contact for Children

Journal of Family Violence - The impact of living with domestic violence and abuse has been recognised in policy and law in many jurisdictions as reaching the threshold of ‘significant...     

Reimagining Gender Through Equality Law: What Legal Thoughtways Do Religion and Disability Offer?

Feminist Legal Studies - British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning,...