Kant’s Naturrecht Feyerabend lectures are contemporaneous to his Groundwork, which first sketches some key features of his Critical moral philosophy. Evidence of Kant’s Groundwork stands out when his lectures are compared to Achenwall’s Prolegomena and to Kant’s assigned text, Achenwall’s Ius naturae. Kant’s own Critical Rechtslehre, including his theory of property, develops much later, yet these lectures reveal several of Kant’s key issues and problems, his profound disagreements with traditional and contemporaneous natural law, some of his critical resources for radically improving philosophy of law. This chapter focuses on how Kant’s Critical issues and innovations pertain to individual rights to property.

Speech act theorists take a gift to be among the range of things we can do with words. They also disagree regarding the extent of the participation of the giftee in the act. Can a gift be made unbeknownst to its recipient? If not, is the latter required to accept the gift, in addition to hearing and understanding the utterance through which it is made? Because they give their insights about gifts in passing, speech act theorists also leave important aspects of the act in the dark. They hint at the power of gifts to modify the deontic status of its two parties, but leave to one’s guess the details of the related changes. The aim of the chapter is to reflect further on these quandaries and neglected sides of gifts in light of Reinach’s theory of social acts. The main result of the present Reinachian inquiry is that the puzzles raised by the illocutionary act of making gifts dissolve once attention is redirected from the thing that is gifted to the ownership over that thing.

Hohfeld’s and Reinach’s ontologies of rights have rarely been compared. After having highlighted the similarities between them, the focus is on what is arguably their most fundamental disagreement. Hohfeld assumes from the outset that all rights are relations, and consequently claims that all liberties have correlatives, which he calls, for lack of a better term, “no-rights”. Reinach, for his part, maintains that liberties, unlike claims, essentially lack correlatives and counterparts, which is why he calls them “absolute rights”. Who is right? Do liberties have correlatives or not? It is argued that both Reinach and Hohfeld have overgeneralized an initially correct insight. Reinach is right, pace Hohfeld, that some liberties are absolute, but wrong that all are. Hohfeld is right, pace Reinach, that some liberties have no-rights as correlatives, but wrong that all liberties have such correlatives. A reconciled ontology of rights is proposed that makes room for both absolute and relative liberties.

This chapter provides a detailed examination of condominium ownership in China, focusing on the unique legal framework that governs this form of property. The chapter begins by highlighting the significance of condominiums in China’s housing market, driven by high homeownership rates and rapid urban development. It outlines the three fundamental elements of condominium ownership: individual ownership of a unit, joint ownership of common areas and membership in a Homeowner Association (HOA). It discusses the complexities of parking space allocation – a common source of disputes – and the regulations that address these issues.

The role and management structure of HOAs are thoroughly explored, including their functions, rights and the democratic processes for decision-making and electing committee members. The chapter also examines the legal obligations regarding maintenance funds and the involvement of local governments in supporting HOAs. Finally, the chapter addresses the participation quota, which determines the proportionate share of common expenses and voting rights among unit owners, ensuring fair and equitable management of condominium properties.

This chapter examines the specificities at work at the international level and their implications for the issue of legitimacy, concentrating on the contemporary context. These specificities have to be understood in relation to the notion and experience of the international community. There are five distinctive features that characterize the international level in connection with the sense of international community. Although the interactions of these characteristics make the international system what it is, this chapter addresses them individually to identify clearly their nature and respective significance for international legitimacy. These features include the ambiguity of the international community; the national bent of international life; cultural diversity and disparity of development; the hegemonic and yet fragmented and contested conception and exercise of power; and the extent to which actors (states and individuals, in particular) have the possibility of ownership—that is, of being represented and of participating at the international level, including in terms of consent.

This chapter sets out the debates that have grown up around CEOs, highlighting three major reasons why they warrant serious study: their importance to the companies they lead, their wider economic and political power, and what their careers tell us about social mobility. To address these debates the book explores three questions: Who were the CEOs and how did they get into the role? What did they do? Did they matter for their companies and Britain’s economy and society? To answer these questions, a unique database of the CEOs of the top 100 most valuable UK public companies between 1900 and 2009 has been assembled. This consists of 475 companies and 1,397 CEOs. For each CEO a career biography is created. To analyse the data, we draw on Upper Echelons Theory and Agency Theory, alongside historical scholarship to understand the environments in which they operated. The chapter then sets out the five analytical threads that are developed throughout the book. The chapter closes by discussing how the nomenclature around top corporate officers evolved from ‘chairman’ to ‘managing director’ to ‘chief executive officer’.

Owners generally get to decide what happens to their property, and this is reflected in legal discussions of property rights and in how children and adults view ownership. Owners’ control over property fits with the idea that ownership serves to reduce conflicts over resources. This chapter first briefly reviews experimental research that fits with this side of ownership. However, the chapter then reviews ways that ownership can take control away from owners. One line of research work shows that children and adults think that nonowners are sometimes allowed to access and even modify property without the owner’s permission. A second line of research shows that whereas people normally have some choice in acquiring ownership or giving it up, people sometimes are viewed as acquiring and retaining ownership even when they do not want to.

Natural rights can justify legal rights to control and dispose of those resources exclusively – that is, rights of ownership. Ownership is justified on moral grounds when it seems likely in practice to help people acquire and use resources more effectively than alternate regimes would – especially, a system in which resources were open for everyone’s access and use and people enjoyed them with usufructs. This chapter studies four core or paradigm cases in which ownership facilitates use enough to be legitimate. One (associated with Aristotle) stresses ownership’s tendency to reduce disputes over property; another (associated with St. Thomas Aquinas) focuses on how ownership encourages careful management of resources; a third (Locke) focuses on how ownership incentivizes people labor and productivity; and the last (James Madison and other American founders) focuses on ownership’s securing privacy and autonomy for owners’ own preferred uses. This chapter considers egalitarian critiques of ownership, especially by Jeremy Waldron, Joseph Singer, G.A. Cohen, Liam Murphy, and Thomas Nagel. To define ownership, this chapter relies on conceptual work by A.M. Honore and J.E. Penner.

This chapter discusses the interface of artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property (IP) law. It focuses on the protection of AI technology, the contentious qualification of AI systems as authors and/or inventors, and the question of ownership of AI-assisted and AI-generated output. The chapter also treats a number of miscellaneous topics, including the question of liability for IP infringement that takes place by or through the intervention of an AI system. More generally, it notes the ambivalent relationship between AI and the IP community, which appears to drift between apparent enthusiasm for the use of AI in IP practice and a clear hesitancy toward catering for additional incentive creation in the AI sphere by amending existing IP laws.

This chapter consists of an extended discussion of shamanism and related ontological concepts among the Makushi. It opens with a narrative of the author’s experiences with a Makushi shaman named Mogo since 2012 and this shaman’s later death. The chapter discusses shamanic training and practices (including charms, spells, and tobacco use), as well as how shamans form relationships with spirits. It describes methods through which Makushi shamans obtain things and abilities from spirit allies. It examines notions of ‘mastery’ and ‘ownership’ and how these relations are grounded within the local landscape. However, unlike other recent ethnographic accounts from elsewhere in Amazonia, this chapter emphasises dimensions of reciprocity in Makushi shamanic relations with non-human beings. The chapter conceptualises Makushi shamanism through the combined theoretical lenses of historical ecology and Amerindian perspectivism. The shamanic relational mode described in this chapter provides a basis for examining relations with human outsiders in subsequent chapters.

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.

This chapter is a largely non-technical overview of economic and political aspects of wind energy policy. The cost of wind energy is assessed in terms of Levelised Cost of Energy (LCoE) with equations given in full and simplified form. Using a large database historic installed costs for UK wind both on- and offshore are given, from the earliest projects to the present day. The observed trends are discussed. Operational and balancing costs are outlined, the latter reflecting the intermittency of wind power. LCoE estimates are made for a range of installed costs and output capacity factors at typical discount rates, and compared with current generation prices. The chapter considers the economics of onsite generation with the example of a private business using wind energy to offset demand; the energy displacement and export statistics are extrapolated to compare with a national scenario for 100% renewable electricity generation. The topic of ownership is introduced and examined in the context of the UK’s first community-owned windfarm. The chapter concludes with a brief review of UK renewable energy policy, which originated with legislation to protect the nuclear power industry.

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.