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The relation between property and sovereignty is contested. The protection of both persons and property are two core government functions. These functions come into conflict when the exercise of a property right harms others. How do we determine when that exercise is legitimately viewed as a self-regarding act that does not affect others, and when such an exercise does harm others and thus comes within the legitimate sphere of government regulation? Property norms help answer this question by orienting us in a moral universe through background understandings that define legitimate interests. Norms orient us, first, by telling us who is an owner with regard to any particular entitlement in a resource, and second, by telling owners when they are obligated to take into account the effects of their actions on others. In so doing, property norms define which externalities we must pay attention to and seek (if possible) to prevent.

This chapter introduces the concept of banishment. It discusses the return of banishment through the stories of three individuals in Seattle, who supposedly violated the trespass law and drug traffic loitering ordinance. It then analyzes the return of banishment, which is widely considered as an archaic legal practice. Another archaic legal practice discussed in this chapter is the revival of police power. The chapter also explains why the study focuses on the rise of banishment in Seattle and provides an outline of the chapters that follow.

In the formative years of the Assam Forest Department, forest management and implementation of forest laws often collided with the livelihood practices of the people and the natives. As a result, peasants and people often interfered with the foresters in the hopes of asserting their rights on forestlands. These petty disturbances such as removal of timber marks, cattle trespass, and ploughing inside the Reserved Forests were identified as forest crimes. This chapter discusses the dissent and protest of peasants over the colonial intervention and forest conservation of the Assam forests. The conservation and intervention of the colonial rulers and foresters changed the landscape and the man-Nature relationship in terms of traditional livelihood practices hence instigating a conflict between peasants and foresters. Movements have been made to understand the dichotomy between forest and agriculture however, the conflict between agrarian and forest frontier remains to be unresolved.

This chapter argues that trespassing livestock were a major cause of friction between Indians and English colonists. Even so, Native Americans and colonists found ways to cooperate with one another to resolve problems that animals caused. As a result of their efforts, the middle decades of the 17th century were characterized as much by cooperation as confrontation.

This chapter opens the discussion of exclusion by addressing public and private efforts to exclude undocumented Latino/a immigrants from local housing and from crossing ranchland in the southwestern states along the U.S.-Mexico border. Public efforts include those of several U.S. cities to prohibit rentals to undocumented immigrants, as well as to restrict the presence in the community of Latino/a day laborers soliciting work. Private efforts include those of southwestern ranchers and their supporters who wield the legal doctrine of trespass to legally and physically exclude transitory immigrant crossings.

For Hume the power of consent raised the Problem of Normative Power as much as the power to make promises. To see the parallel here we must distinguish the power of consent from the normative significance of choice. Choice serves our interest in controlling the non-normative situation. And to see the solution to Hume’s problem, we must recognize that consent operates on bare wrongings like rape and trespass. What grounds the power of consent is our interest in having control over the normative situation and in particular our permissive interest, our interest in its being the case that such things as rape and trespass wrong us unless we declare otherwise. In its reliance on declaration, consent works quite differently from forgiveness.

Where the claimant is the victim of a tort, exemplary damages may be awarded to punish the defendant for cynically committing a tort. Other remedies are available which are purely restitutionary in effect, notably restitutionary damages and money had and received. The most important question relating to the award of restitutionary remedies for torts is whether they are available regardless of the tort which is committed or whether they are only available in respect of certain torts. If the latter is the case, it is then necessary to identify the criteria which are used to identify those torts for which restitutionary relief is available. This chapter focuses on the so-called doctrine of ‘waiver of tort’ which has been particularly influential in the development of the law in this area. Torts for which restitutionary remedies are available include trespass to land, trespass to goods, conversion, interference with intellectual property rights, nuisance, deceit, and invasion of privacy.

This chapter shows how the law of torts at the start of the 19th century was still recognizably medieval. It was characterized by the division between the action of trespass and the action on the case, the latter of which was subdivided into a number of nominate forms and a large residuary group linked together by nothing stronger than that the defendant was alleged to have caused loss to the plaintiff. In the 19th century, a substantial part of this residuary group coalesced as the tort of negligence. This brought about a wholesale realignment of the law of torts, as this tort, defined by the reference to the quality of the defendant's conduct, cut across the previous categorization of torts.

This chapter shows that with the emergence of the action of covenant as a specifically and exclusively contractual remedy, set the stage for the Common law of obligations to align itself with Roman law. If events had been allowed to run their course, trespass would have become the equivalent of the Romans' delictal ability and covenant the equivalent of their contract, leaving entitlement-based action of debt-retinue to cover the proprietary ground of Romans' vindication. That this did not occur resulted from a tiny procedural tightening in the rules of proof applicable to the action of covenant but not to trespass or debt, as a result of which it became less attractive to plaintiffs.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how the action of trespass as an ordinary feature of the jurisdiction of the royal courts gives some shape to the emergent law of tort. It then shows how, by the beginning of the 14th century, the action of trespass became established around a core of (minimally) forcible wrongdoing. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of the trespass on the case.

This chapter discusses the development of nominate torts to protect property interests and reputation. From its earliest roots, the action of trespass protected property rights. So long as there had been an invasive interference, a ‘trespass’ in the modern legal sense of the word, an action would lie against the alleged wrongdoer. The difficulty with the use of these trespassory remedies was that in theory, they provided the successful plaintiff with damages rather than the land in issue. This was sidestepped in the 16th century by the use of the action of ejectment, an action designed to protect the lessee rather than the freeholder, in which specific recovery of the land could be achieved.

This chapter shows how, in the 16th century, the action of trespass on the case came to be established as the primary, ordinary remedy for the imposition of liability on informal contracts. The route by which this was achieved was the same as that followed in other situations: first of all the argument that trespassory remedy was simply supplementing the remedies that were otherwise available, followed by a wholesale expansion into the ground covered by other remedies.

This chapter shows how central to the later medieval law of torts was the division between the action of trespass and action on the case. The former lay for invasive interferences to land, goods, or the person; the latter covered a range situations where loss had been caused wrongfully. The formal division between trespass and case, and the crystallization of negligence are discussed.

Environmental issues became far more salient along the rapidly developing coast than in the dry, sparsely populated San Joaquin Valley. With the political conflict over state tidelands in Santa Barbara County temporarily resolved by Boone and the legislative ban on new leases, the coastal controversy shifted to municipal lands at Venice and Huntington beaches. When the Huntington Beach story burst into full public view, the scandal focused on the economic losses to state coffers, rather than beach protection, since the new wells were not on the beach. The then Governor James Rolph, whose administration also publicly opposed coastal drilling, embraced an extraordinary backroom deal to transfer publicly-owned natural resources at Huntington Beach to trespassing private companies. But the trespassing and royalty agreements did little to capture revenue for the state government or to speed Huntington Beach's transition to its future beach economy.

This chapter concentrates on the years of Glanvill and the early plea rolls, whilst noting some earlier changes. The main focus is on serious offences, most judged before the eyre. Treatment of such offences is not only the best recorded, but also the area of most significant change. It discusses types of offence, prevention and police, procedure, punishment of serious offences, lesser offences and trespass, and amercements.

This chapter deals with the protection of property interests in chattels. The common law's treatment of this subject differs from that of civil law in at least two aspects. First, the common law has no notion of ownership in the sense of absolute title. Second, the primary remedy at common law for the protection of property interests is not the compulsory return of the property to the plaintiff but rather damages. Thus, the protection of property interests is a category of the law of torts rather than of the law of property. Trespass is the fountain head of the law of tort. The chapter also considers liability in conversion, entitlement to sue in conversion, and remedies issues.

By the close of the medieval period the real actions had become very unsatisfactory, and a way of escape from their complexities was found in the action of eiectio fi'rmae, a variety of the writ of trespass, that is to say by tort action for compensatory damages. The termor was denied novel disseisin, and for long lacked any adequate protection against eviction by a stranger. But if he was unable to bring the assize and obtain specific recovery of his term, he was at least able to recover damages in an action of trespass, and for those who had bought terms of years to hold them as short-term investments damages would not be a wholly inadequate remedy.

This chapter examines the history of the emergence of the action of assumpsit in England. The steady increase in the jurisdiction of the royal courts over actions for trespasses, or torts of wrongs, in the 14th century provided the necessary condition for the emergence of action of assumpsit. During the 15th century, assumpsit became more recognized but as nothing more than a word used in one of the many ways of pleading a trespass action. It only acquired its own identity, rules, and theoretical doctrines in the 16th century.

This chapter examines the litigation over real property in England during the Tudor period. The 15th and the 16th centuries saw a revolution not only in the substance of the land law but also in the law and practice of real actions. What is most striking about the patterns of actual litigation during this period is that the majority of actions or court cases involving title to land, or other questions of real property law, were suddenly personal actions. These include forcible entry, replevin, and trespassing.