Law Commons^™

Turning Wine Into Water: Water As Privileged Signifier In The Grapes Of Wrath, David N. Cassuto

David N Cassuto

I will argue that The Grapes of Wrath represents an indictment of the American myth of the garden and its accompanying myth of the frontier. The lever with which Steinbeck pries apart and ultimately dismantles these fictions is a critique of the agricultural practices that created the Dust Bowl and then metamorphosed into a new set of norms which continued to victimize both the land and its inhabitants. Both nineteenth-century homesteading (based on the Homestead Act of 1862) and agribusiness, its twentieth century descendant (born from the failure of the Homestead Act), relied on the (mis)use of water to accomplish …

Between Catastrophe And Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, And Life Narratives, Cynthia Dobbs, Daphne Lamothe, Theresa Tensuan

Cynthia Dobbs

My “Country” Lies Over The Ocean: Seasteading And Polycentric Law, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay considers the implications of the Seasteading Institute upon notions of law and sovereignty and argues that seasteading could make possible the implementation or ordering of polycentric legal systems while providing evidence for the viability of private-property anarchism or anarchocapitalism, at least in their nascent forms. This essay follows in the wake of Edward P. Stringham’s edition Anarchy and the Law and treats seasteading and polycentric law as concrete realities that lend credence to certain anarchist theories. Polycentric law in particular allows for institutional diversity that enables a multiplicity of rules to coexist and even compete in the open …