Ground Rules: How Property Makes the Countryside
Jessica A. Shoemaker
Steinhardt Foundation Professor of law
3:30 p.m., Nov. 12, Swanson Auditorium, Nebraska Union
A live webstream option will be available.
Reception to follow
The struggle for land justice has endured for centuries, with private property sometimes misunderstood as a static set of allocated rights. In fact, property law is a dynamic and pluralistic system built by ongoing human choices. At the birth of this country, America offered individual homesteaders property rights to instill a particular agrarian vision. Those rights, however, were built on other property sacrifices, including Indigenous dispossession and slavery. Today, we continue to make property choices that profoundly shape how we inhabit our shared landscape. This lecture will explore how these choices shape the contours of rural lives and livelihoods in often invisible ways, including not only who gets to be a farmer but also landscape-level conflicts over energy transmission and a changing climate. Building on a series of case studies from land reform in Scotland to the claims of Indigenous pipeline protesters, this talk will examine research on adaptive property-system change in the U.S. and abroad, focusing on the many ways this kind of new thinking about property law can lead us on a path toward a more prosperous and sustainable futures for all.
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