Book Review: American Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own, by Stuart Banner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Property Law is about things, but only secondarily. It is primarily about relationships between people as they pertain to things. As a result, although we commonly identify material and immaterial things as private, common, or state property, property law deals with the subset of human relationships that determines rights and responsibilities with respect to things. The institution of property law — the rules that define this subset of human relationships — arises in the context of scarcity. When things are scarce and accordingly hold exchange value, humans construct ideas of ownership. We have been doing so for millennia, or at least long enough that the subject of property law has acquired a reputation as antiquarian. Certainly in the common law tradition, many property law courses appear lost in the mist of English legal history. This need not be so. Property law deals with the allocation of scarce resources and therefore is also about the allocation of power. Understood this way, property law can be a lens through which to understand many of the most pressing social issues of the day. Similarly, the history of property law need not be dull. At least ten centuries of social change, economic transformation, technological innovation, and human drama can be seen in the customs and conventions, judicial decisions, and statutes that comprise the law of property in common law jurisdictions. In American Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own, Stuart Banner, the prolific legal historian and property law scholar, sets out to describe contestation and change in ideas about property over several centuries in the United States. The result is a beautifully and accessibly written book, stunning in scope, elegant in structure, and remarkably revealing in its detail about the debates over and the uses of property law doctrine and of the broader ideas that support the divergent interests and claims.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.025 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".