One thoroughgoing assumption of both classical liberal and neoliberal thinking has to do with the supreme importance of property rights. Accompanying most liberal notions of property ownership is the ability to exclude all others from using your property should you wish to. This has led to a curious phenomenon – the absentee landlord. The absentee landlord owns property, controls its use, and profits from it despite not being physically present or practically using the property. In this chapter, Goel looks at how a group of holy, third-gender people in India, hijras, think about property ownership and use. Due to a century or two of colonial degradation, hijras have been stripped of many of their rights to property and its use, and occupy a marginal place in Indian society today. As a result, they maintain an elaborate system of communally maintained use-rights in the cities they live in, apportioning the ability to walk mendicant rounds and grant blessings. This chapter, more than just offering a strict dichotomous set of cases, invites the reader to think about what possession of land or space looks like when we abandon contractual exclusive ownership and instead embrace rights that come from use. The chapter thereby moves beyond the neoliberal tradition and takes the reader right to the edge of the classical liberal tradition of thought, with its emphasis on property rights as an intrinsic component of individual liberty.

Anglo-Norman sources often ignore what we call the economy, or only make very quick allusions to it, thus leaving in the shadows the most dynamic moment of economic growth that this space has ever known. The narrative texts nevertheless make it possible to approach the representations that the clerics of the twelfth century had of the concrete problems of the satisfaction of needs and of the socially useful and morally virtuous use of natural wealth. The theme of hunger, common in the sources of the Rhenish regions, does not appear very frequently, and most often in connection with war. But the reading of texts by William of Malmesbury relating to the reign of William Rufus and the life of Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester also shows that the value of rulers, whether king or bishop, was measured by the subsistence of the inhabitants, especially the poorest. The question of the relationship between resources and needs, and more generally that of livelihood, thus appears to be a major political problem.

‘What is the value of global justice?’ is the question that leads the enquiry in this chapter. By tracking the circulation of a photograph of a defendant before the International Criminal Court, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the primacy of market value in the dominant understanding of global justice. As the photograph is circulated through news media, non-governmental organisations, to an artist’s studio, and to an exhibition, the value of the photograph crystallises as congealing the message, and legitimacy, of global justice as concerning the fight against impunity. From a theoretical perspective, this is explained through an emphasis on the photograph’s ‘exchange value’ over its ‘use value’. The chapter closes with a stock-taking, highlighting the narrowing of what is seen as global justice when it is marketised: (a) the narrowing of visibility impacts on the multiplicity of global justice visions, and (b) the narrowing of visibility renders structural violence invisible.

The chapter establishes the centrality of stability in property law and theory today. It depicts and characterizes the legal protection of attachment, control, and possession as constituting a vision of stability. The chapter then analyzes and defends this conclusion along three categories: theories and justifications supporting the right to private property, legal doctrines, and doctrines that work to protect stable property relationships. It argues, following the famous Marxian distinction, that while property law accommodates a great level of flexibility in exchange value, it does not facilitate the same level of flexibility when it comes to use value. Use of physical property continues to be intimately tied to attachment and stability.