KJuris: Larissa Katz 'Property Within Borders'

The Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to host Professor Larissa Katz for the fourth workshop in the 2023/24 KJuris programme.

Title

Property Within Borders

Abstract

This chapter sets out and explains the transformative, if hidden, effect of borders on property rights. Property rights, I argue, stop at borders, with implications for state-state relations and state-individual relations with respect to things. The foundation of my argument is the idea of ownership as an office with a mandate—and part of system of offices with mandates to answer different questions within a territorially confined legal order. The chapter offers an alternative explanation for the apparent portability of property rights in a universal, pre-state right against arbitrary treatment, grounding a person’s right not to be arbitrarily excluded from available procedures for the acquisition of rights.

Author Bio

Larissa Katz is Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Private Law Theory. She is also the Associate Dean (Graduate Programs). Prior to joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto in 2013, Professor Katz clerked for the late Justice Charles D. Gonthier at the Supreme Court of Canada, was a litigation associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (NYC) and taught at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law.

Professor Katz writes about private law with a focus on equity and property. Her work appears in journals such as Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Legal Theory, Jurisprudence, University of Toronto Law Journal, McGill Law Journal and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Notre Dame Law Review. Her work is included in anthologies such as The Philosophical Foundations of Property Law (Oxford University Press), The Philosophical Foundations of Equity, The Cambridge Companion to Law and Philosophy (Cambridge U. Press). She is currently writing People, (Offices), and Things: Property in the Legal Order (under contract with Oxford University Press).

Professor Katz has been a visiting fellow at the John Fleming Centre for the Advancement of Legal Research at the Australian National University, a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po (Paris) and an HLA Hart Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Ethics & Philosophy of Law, Oxford University. Professor Katz actively works on issues in law and policy in Canada and the United States. Professor Katz serves as a member of the International Advisory Panel for the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement of the Law (Fourth), Property. She is an Associate Editor of Law and Philosophy and on the advisory board of Queen’s Law Journal.