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The Meaning Of Dispossession, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

This Article critiques our focus on possession as the cornerstone of theories of property, examining the limitations of possession both as a theoretical concept and as a practical one. Second, the article examines how an investment-based labor approach has sharply shaped out understandings of possession. By examining the intertwining of possession and labor during colonization, the article describes how the labor approach to possession excluded more communal corollaries and instilled in American property law a consistent push toward grounding land claims at the labor-possession nexus.

Re-thinking the labor-possession nexus yields important shifts. First, labor matters for other reasons than investment-backed …