Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in "Commodity and Propriety," the first full-length history of the meaning of property, Gregory Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as "proprietary," a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. This view of property has even operated in periods such as the second half of the nineteenth century when market forces seemed to...

This collection on the privatization of property ownership seeks to explore the middle ground between state socialism and corporate capitalism. A Fourth Way? examines the transition to market economies in post-Communist Eastern Europe and considers Western experiences with alternative forms of ownership. The contributors to this study argue that neither the market alone nor state planning is adequate, in economic or moral terms, as the exclusive means to regulate the economy. Several essays focus on the impediments to the transition to market economies in Poland, Hungary and Germany. Others...

Property and Community fills a major gap in the legal literature on property and its relationship to community. The essays included differ from past discussions, including those provided by law-and-economics, by providing richer accounts of community. By and large, prior discussions by property theorists treat communities as agglomerations of individuals and eschew substantive accounts of justice, favoring what Charles Taylor has called "procedural" conceptions. These perspectives on ownership obscure the possibility that the "community" might have a moral status that differs from...