Syllabus
Week 1—Sept 3rd Introductions
Week 2—Sept. 10th Legal & Historical Methodologies
Required Reading:
Matthew J. Festa, “Applying a Usable Past: The Uses of History in Law” (2008) 38 Seton Hall L. Rev. 479-553.
Paul McHugh, “The Politics of Historiography and the Taxonomies of the Colonial Past: Law, History and the Tribes,” in Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings, Making Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 164-195.
Philip Girard and Jim Phillips, “Rethinking ‘The Nation’ in National Legal History: A Canadian Perspective” (2011) 29 Law & History Review 607-626.
Supplemental Reading:
Arthur J. Ray, “Native History on Trial: Confessions of an Expert Witness” (2003) 84 Canadian Historical Review 253-275.
John G. Reid, William C. Wicken, Stephen E. Patterson, D.G. Bell, “History, Native Issues, and the Courts: A Forum” (1998) 28 Acadiensis 3-26.
Week 3—Sept. 17th Property & the Common Law: Feudal Origins
Required Reading:
J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th Edition (London: Butterworths, 2002), “Chapter 13 – Real Property: Feudal Tenure,” pp. 223-247, and “Chapter 15 – Inheritance and Estates,” pp. 259-279.
David J. Seipp, “The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law” (1994) 12 Law and History Review 29-91.
Eileen Spring, “The Heiress-at-Law: English Real Property Law from a New Point of View,” (1990) 8 Law and History Review 273-296.
Supplemental Reading:
J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th Edition (London: Butterworths, 2002), “Chapter 14 – Real Property: Feudalism and Uses,” 248-258, and “Chapter 16 – Real Property: Family Settlements,” pp. 280-297.
S.F.C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London: Butterworths, 1981), 99-239.
Theodore F.T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5th Ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), 506-623.
A.W.B Simpson, A History of the Land Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Eileen Spring, “The Settlement of Land in Nineteenth-Century England,” (1964) 8 American Journal of Legal History 209-223.
Week 4—Sept. 24th Property & Class I
Required Reading:
David Sugarman and G.R. Rubin, Towards a New History of Law and Material Society in England, 1750-1914 (London: Butterworths, 1984), 1-13, 23-42.
Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Wilson, eds. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 17-63.
John H. Langbein, “Albion’s Fatal Flaws,” (1983) 98 Past and Present 96-120.
Peter Linebaugh, “(Marxist) Social History and (Conservative) Legal History: A Reply to Professor Langbein,” (1985) 60 New York University Law Review 212-243.
Week 5—Oct. 1st “In the beginning all the world was America”
Required Reading:
John Locke, “Of Property,” Second Treatise on Government, chapter 5, reprinted in C.B. Macpherson, Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 15-27.
William Cronon, “Bounding the Land” in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 54-81.
James Willard Hurst, “The Release of Energy” in Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 3-32.
Bruce Ziff, “The Law of Property in Animals, Newfoundland-Style,” in Property on Trial, 9-33.
Supplemental Reading:
Philip Girard, “Land Law, Liberalism, and the Agrarian Ideal: British North America, 1750-1920,” in John McLaren, AR Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, eds, Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005).
John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).
Nicholas Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Spaces of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid” (2003) 93 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 121-141.
Week 6—Oct. 8th The Legal Realists & Property
Required Reading:
Morton J. Horwitz, “The Progressive Transformation in the Conception of Property,” in The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (Oxford, 1992) 145-67.
Morris Cohen, “Property and Sovereignty” (1927) 13 Cornell L.Q. 8-30.
Stuart Banner, “People, Not Things,” in American Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own (Harvard, 2011), 94-108.
Week 7—Oct. 15th Property & Class II
Required reading:
Eric Reiter, “Nuisance and Neighbourhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” in Property on Trial, 35-70.
Eric Tucker, “The Malling of Property Law?: The Toronto Eaton Centre Cases, 1984-1987, and the Right to Exclude,” in Property on Trial, 303-352.
Nicholas Blomley, “Begging to Differ: Panhandling, Public Space, and Municipal Property,” in Property on Trial, 393-424.
Week 8—Oct. 22nd Property in the Immaterial
Required reading:
C. Ian Kyer, Regina v. Stewart: Is Information Property?” in Property on Trial, 353-392.
Patricia L. Farnese, “Pirate or Prophet? Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser,” in Property on Trial, 425-454.
Stuart Banner, “Owning Life,” 238-256, and “The End of Property?” 276-291, in American Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own (Harvard, 2011).
Week 9—Oct. 29th Public Regulation & Private Property
Required Reading:
Frank Luce and Karen Schucher, “‘The right to discrimination’: Kenneth Bell versus Carl McKay and the Ontario Human Rights Commission,” in Property on Trial, 119-158.
Eran Kaplinsky, “The Zoroastrian Temple in Toronto: A Case Study in Land Use Regulation, Canadian-Style,” in Property on Trial, 223-258.
Jim Phillips and Jeremy Martin, “Manitoba Fisheries v The Queen: The Origins of Canada’s De Facto Expropriation Doctrine,” in Property on Trial, 259-302.
Douglas C. Harris, “A Railway, a City, and the Public Regulation of Private Property: CPR v. City of Vancouver,” in Property on Trial, 455-486.
Week 10—Nov. 5th No Class
Week 11—Nov. 12th Student Presentations
Week 12—Nov. 19th Student Presentations
Week 13—Nov. 26th Student Presentations