Law Commons^™

Law, Land, Identity: The Case Of Lady Anne Clifford, Carla Spivack

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article presents the case history of Lady Anne Clifford, a seventeenth century Englishwoman who spent most of her adult life fighting to regain her ancestral estates, which she felt her father had unjustly left to her uncle instead of to her. Although, as the article explains, she had the better of the legal argument, that was no match for the combined forces of her two husbands and of King James I, who sought to deprive her of her land. Finally, however, because Clifford outlived her uncle's son, the last male heir, she did inherit the estates.

The article examines …

Globalization And The Re-Establishment Of Women's Land Rights In Nigeria: The Role Of Legal History, Adetoun Ilumoka

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Much has been written on women's limited legal rights to land in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, which is often attributed to custom and customary law. Persisting biases against women in legal regimes governing land ownership, allocation and use, result in a situation in which women, in all age groups, are vulnerable to dispossession and to abuse by male relatives in increasingly patriarchal family and community governance structures.

This paper raises questions about the genesis of ideas about women's rights to land in Nigeria today. It is an analysis of two court cases from South Western Nigeria in the early …

Pragmatism, Feminism, And The Problem Of Bad Coherence, Catharine Pierce Wells

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reinterpreting Property by Margaret Jane Radin

Chix Nix Bundle-O-Stix: A Feminist Critique Of The Disaggregation Of Property, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Michigan Law Review

Property was dead, to begin with. The coroner, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, revealed that the unity, tangibility, and objectivity of property perceived by our ancestors was a phantom. Property is, in fact, merely a "bundle of sticks." When conceptualized as a collection of rights, property loses its distinctive qualities and its essence. It therefore does not, or at least should not, exist. Without unity and physicality, property loses its objectivity and can only be a myth. The rabble might still believe in the old gods of property, but the educated "specialists" now know that this was vulgar superstition. Once the populace …