This chapter explores how readers who have chosen an e-book decide on their next step, contrasting the motivations for purchase (or conditional use license purchase), loan, and piracy. It draws on legal scholarship, book history, and fan studies to investigate how bookness and realness in the form of meaningful ownership can be constituted if desired, acknowledging that bookness and realness may be unwanted when readers prefer temporary, unauthorised, or unambiguously illegal uses. This recasts e-books as an integral part of building a personal library: sometimes as components, but sometimes just as tools. It concludes with evolving understanding of the rights of the reader and the fraught question of e-book control, and readers’ experiences of conflict with corporate entities over ownership of their collections. This further demonstrates how readers are able to move flexibly between conceptions of e-books as real books, ersatz books, and digital proxies.

This chapter discusses archaic Roman property law, whose symbolism and terminology show a striking orientation toward the ownership of living creatures, human and animal. That symbolism and terminology was seized upon by many of the leading thinkers of the past, who believed it offered clues to the origins of human society. It was also seized upon by both Communist and Fascist ideologues. Today, by contrast, its significance is generally dismissed. Modern scholarship has been heavily dedicated to reconstructing the socio-economic realities; scholars often deploy their learning to dispel the “myths” in the sources, among them the myths in the archaic Roman sources. Yet the myths matter; “idioms of power” cannot simply be written off. The chapter brings the anthropology of property law to bear on the interpretation of these mysterious sources, and describes the long intellectual and political history of their interpretation and ideological use.

This chapter discusses the formation of high classical Roman property law, which displays what Orlando Patterson calls a master/slave “idiom of power.” It focuses on the emergence of the term dominus, “master,” as the ordinary word for “owner.” The rise of the dominus was once the topic of extensive analysis and controversy, and it figured prominently in the ideologies of Communism and Fascism. It has, however, been forgotten by contemporary scholars. The chapter sets out to revive this forgotten topic. Drawing on Roman social history, the chapter argues that the appearance of the new terminology of the dominus in classical law can be linked to important social changes in the nature of Roman elite power. The chapter closes by arguing that Roman property law bore a kinship to classical Greco-Roman religion, which was marked by the “symbolism and ideology of the paradigmatic hunter.”

This chapter discusses the most famous hypothesis about the development of property law: that Western social evolution was determined by a passage “from slavery to feudalism,” from the ownership of humans in the slave economies of Antiquity to the ownership of land in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. That hypothesis was embraced by Marx, Weber, Bloch, and many others, but has been rejected today, because it rested on claims about economic history that have been proven dubious. The chapter argues that there was truth in the classical hypothesis, but that it should be reinterpreted as an account of transformation in the legal imagination. The chapter investigates the origins of the classic theories, and makes the case that the classic thinkers erred by mistaking the imaginative orientations in the legal sources for the economic realities.

Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

Copyright law safeguards the exclusive rights of authors to their intellectual creations, emphasizing reproduction, public display, and adaptation. A fundamental distinction within this realm is between the intangible creative work and its tangible representations. Owning a tangible embodiment (like a painting) does not grant rights to reproduce the intellectual work it embodies. This demarcation is critical in the dynamic landscape of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as acquiring an NFT does not automatically confer rights to the associated work. Instead, rights hinge on explicit contractual terms accompanying the NFT transaction. As the world of NFTs continues to unfold in all sorts of directions, delving deep into the intricacies of copyright law is important for artists, investors, and legal practitioners navigating the digital frontier. This chapter offers insights into the various copyright implications associated with NFTs.

Fueled in part by the wealth created from digital currencies, major art dealers such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s have embraced the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) attached to unique digital works of art. NFTs, how they are related to the blockchain, and the evolution of the market for digital art is the subject of this chapter. Despite recent decreases in value, it appears that digital art can be added to the growing list of uses for blockchain technology, which is now becoming a part of modern life. This chapter proceeds in five sections. First, the overview of the evolutionary progression of blockchain technology in the form of NFTs. Second, a description of the emergence of the market for digital art. Third, an explanation and historical account of digital art and related recent issues. Fourth, a coverage of the abrupt decline in the market price for many NFTs. And last, a conclusion, which focuses on how the dramatic extension of blockchain and other digital technology to the world of art represents a new and exciting platform for creative expression. This chapter offers a valuable addition to the literature by providing a readable introduction and overview of what is now known about the likely impact of blockchain technology and NFTs to art. Additionally, this important development should have a significant impact on the future of innovation and property law.

This chapter addresses the questions of what public property is and why it matters. The key to defending public property lies in disambiguating the sense in which this system of rights with respect to external resources is public and, ultimately, about our property. Public property can be said to be ours in the sense that we can freely use it. On this view, held by lawyer economists, democratic egalitarians, and some Kantians, public property is akin to easement rights to enter and use a resource without the leave of its owner. The chapter criticizes proponents of the easement conception, arguing that they cannot but fail to explain why the “publicness” of the resource matters. It demonstrates that easement-like rights are fully consistent with a system of private property.

Instead, the chapter argues that public property’s distinctive value lies in control, rather than use, rights. Public property is ours in the sense that we are entitled to control it. That is, it extends autonomous agency to the construction of public spaces and resources. Public property places individuals in a position of collective self-government, manifested in the following two particular ways: First, expressing the ideas and commitments that the political community as a whole affirms; and second, exerting control over the construction and direction of the resources that make up the environment the individuals occupy.

Chapter 5 examines the genesis of the regional organization G5 Sahel and its Joint Force composed of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. It looks at a group of African actors that set up the organization with extraordinary support by French and other European partners in 2014. Following the discussion on the entanglement of spatial semantics with the issue of distrust and suspicion in politics from Chapter 4, this chapter begins with an analysis of the different narratives about the true ‘origin’ of the G5 Sahel, exploring narratives of French lobbying and different African foreign policy objectives. This links directly to questions of ownership and to how and why this regional organization emerged based on the idea of ‘core countries of the Sahel’, which excluded Algeria and Nigeria. Chapter 5 addresses these questions and shows how different spatial semantics were used in the formation of the G5 Sahel and its Joint Force to draw up a new region, to re-regionalize West African political space, to reposition the involved actors in the best possible way to gain influence on the security and military responses to the escalating armed violence in Mali and neighbouring countries.

This chapter explores the reclamation of property rights in the 1980s at a local state-owned enterprise in eastern Shanxi. It draws on previously unexamined company archives and local government documents to trace how descendants of Shanxi’s “small capitalists” petitioned the government to recognize their ownership and redeem the loss of private property when the new communist government had nationalized the factory without compensation in the early 1950s. The chapter highlights the tensions in administering historical justice in a transitional environment, where a mix of revolutionary practices, family traditions, and modern law came to shape the procedures, capacity, and legitimacy of a socialist state.

There are few issues in South African politics, culture and literature more resonant, more freighted, more emotive, than land. Chapter 5 begins by observing the ongoing centrality of land and ownership, especially in the wake of land reform programmes and populist shifts in political rhetoric. Novels by Anne Landsman, Marlene van Niekerk and Damon Galgut engage in detail with the crucial question of ownership, which is linked to race. They explore connections between the abject, labour and ownership, with the bodily and affective experiences shared by white women farmers and their brown or black workers being central themes of each novel. These novels struggle to articulate answers to the challenges of land reform, but they also foreground intimate gestures of recompense. In relation to the ethics of care, and the practices associated with love, they mark an important beginning of the conversation between the post-apartheid pastoral on the one hand, and land reform on the other.

This paper provides a framework for evaluating policy proposals aimed at invigorating competition and improving corporate governance amid a high and increasing level of common ownership of product market competitors. In particular, I propose that any effective proposal must have the effect of separating the level at which diversification is achieved from the level at which corporate governance is exercised. Several extant proposals are likely to have that effect. I also discuss conceptual breakthroughs on several issues that regulators and industry stakeholders considered necessary to address before changing policy, including (i) the joint recognition of vertical and horizontal common ownership links, (ii) agency problems, (iii) informational and organizational frictions, (iv) methods to infer causality, (v) a better understanding of how investors portfolio choice depends on firms’ strategic interactions, and (vi) improving data quality.

This chapter discusses the relationship between corporate governance and corporate sustainability. We start by looking into the different components of the general corporate governance system. This allows us to revisit a central tension: shareholder- versus stakeholder-oriented governance. We then discuss how well-designed corporate governance can support firms’ sustainability efforts. We label this debate ‘corporate governance for sustainability’, and we discuss how sustainability topics can be integrated into the discussions of boards of directors. Next, we show that some aspects of corporate governance can themselves pose challenges that need to be discussed under the ESG umbrella. We label this debate ‘corporate governance as sustainability’, and we focus on topics that reflect the ‘G’ in ESG (e.g., executive compensation). Finally, we discuss elements of a possible reformed corporate governance system which would allow to better address sustainability-related debates.

This chapter covers personal property, which is a broad category and a developing one. It is the most important type of property today in the commercial world, partly because of its breadth. The chapter starts by placing personal property in the wider area of property, distinguishing it from land or interests in land. Whether something is land or personal property can have important consequences for its ownership, or security interests over it. We will also examine the test applied to decide whether something that was goods has become a ‘fixture’, and thus part of the land. Second, we will look at the usual classifications within personal property, which have legal consequences. Possession, and its acquisition or loss, plays a crucial role when considering ownership of personal property. Lastly, what can be done when a holder’s rights in personal property are interfered with? We will look at the main remedies available to enforce those rights.