On March 6, Professor M.C. Mirow will deliver the keynote address at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge’s Global Center Annual Symposium in Scaramento, California. Entitled, The Promise and Perils of an International Law of Property, the symposium focuses on Professor John Spranking’s recent book, The International Law of Property (Oxford University Press, 2014). The title of Professor Mirow’s talk is “Rerum Novarum: New Things and Recent Paradigms of Property Law.”
Abstract of talk:
Western property and property law have passed through several notable phases and influences. These include the creation of feudalism and its subsequent recasting into economic relationships, the effect of the Enlightenment and liberalism establishing rights to property, the abolition of human property expressed in slavery, the Marxist rejection of private property, and a turn towards the “social” that challenged absolute rights in property.
Sprankling writes that we are on the cusp of a new phase, and he is right. The International Law of Property marks a new era in property and property law. From atomistic traces detected in domestic and international law, Sprankling persuasively constructs the idea of a unified concept of international property. He uncovers it, assembles it, points out its shifting nature, and catalogues what it offers to legal theory and legal practice.
My contribution will examine various aspects of this moment in property law, first by describing the essential attributes of international property and then by evaluating this concept in light of the immediately past paradigmatic moment, the “social.” Rerum Novarum (1891, “Of New Things”), Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on capital and labor, serves as a foundational document in maintaining private property while moving its nature toward social responsibility. These ideas played out over the next several decades in the works of European political and legal theorists who, in turn, influenced western property law. This shift at the beginning of the twentieth century informs our understanding of the important international moment at the beginning of the twenty-first century studied here. Both moments reflect changes in the idea of property and in the idea of international law. Both moments respond to the challenges of “new things.”
“Like FIU Law, Pacific McGeorge is known for being at the forefront of international and comparative law. I am honored to be invited to speak on this topic that combines two of my favorite areas of law, international law and property law,” said Mirow.
Mirow is a founding faculty member of FIU Law and is a member of the Florida Bar.
More information about the symposium found here.