The Lawful Forest is an important contribution to legal history, one that may alter perceptions of the natured history of law for those of conventional property scholarship as well as those more akin to critical property studies, decolonial and post-Marxist scholarship. The work is important for anyone working on understanding the history of the common law and its connection with property forms, where lost accounts of the shaping of black-letter law can be just as useful for a property law professor as for their students.The connecting of custom, nature and community in this text, offers an invaluable archive of all those past and future, in the task of a ‘figurative yearning for a spatial life lived better’ (39).

- Lucy Finchett-Maddock, The Modern Law Review

The Lawful Forest is an important contribution to legal history, one that may alter perceptions of the natured history of law for those of conventional property scholarship as well as those more akin to critical property studies, decolonial and post-Marxist scholarship. The work is important for anyone working on understanding the history of the common law and its connection with property forms, where lost accounts of the shaping of black-letter law can be just as useful for a property law professor as for their students.The connecting of custom, nature and community in this text, offers an invaluable archive of all those past and future, in the task of a ‘figurative yearning for a spatial life lived better’ (39).

- Lucy Finchett-Maddock, The Modern Law Review

This highly original and thought-provoking book takes a scholarly and eclectic approach to thinking about property. Its shift in analytical lenses reveals debates about resources and assets, combining theoretical and pragmatic insights to raise distinctive research questions.

Antonia Lanyard, University of Oxford

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A must-read for scholars thinking about how traditional legal concepts like property law need to be reimagined in the Anthropocene.

- Arpitha Kodiveri, Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law

Using the forest as a thematic device, Clark and Page explore the tensions that pervade our propertied relationships; between commodity and community, abstraction and context, and private enclosure and the public square. They draw on a range of case studies including the 13th century Forest Charter, Thomas More's Utopia, the Diggers' radical agrarianism, the Paris Commune's battle for the right to the city, and Australian forest protestors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By analysing these movements and their contexts, Clark and Page illustrate the origin, history and legal status of the lawful forest and its modern-day companions. Although the dominant spatial paradigm is one where private rights prevail, this book shows that communal relationships with land have always been part of our law and culture.
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Using the forest as a thematic device, Clark and Page explore the tensions that pervade our propertied relationships: between commodity and community, abstraction and context, and private enclosure and the public square.
Read more
Introduction A Theory of the Forest The Ancient Forest A Glimpsed Utopia A Concrete Utopia Ecological Communes A Future Dystopia Index
Undertakes a wide-ranging exploration of our diverse relationships with land that brings together critical property theory and legal geography

Product details

ISBN
9781474487450
Published
2024-05-31
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press; Edinburgh University Press
Height
234 mm
Width
156 mm
Age
UP, 05
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Biographical note

Cristy Clark is an Associate Professor of Law in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her research focuses on legal geography, the commons, and the intersection of human rights, neoliberalism, activism and the environment. John Page is a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research explores the diversity of property in the common law tradition, and how property intersects with public space and the materiality of place.