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The Virtues of Common Ownership

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The Virtues of Common Ownership THE VIRTUES OF COMMON OWNERSHIP ANNA DI ROBILANT∗ INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1359 I. SANDEL’S THEORY OF JUSTICE: A “THICK REPUBLICANISM” ........... 1361 II. COMMON OWNERSHIP: LIBERAL AUTONOMY OR SUBSTANTIVE VALUES?............................................................................................ 1363 III. A NEW APPROACH TO THE COMMONS: RESOURCES, VALUES, AND ENTITLEMENTS .................................................................................. 1370 INTRODUCTION Professor Michael Sandel’s theory of justice is attractive and inspirational for lawyers interested in social change. Sandel’s call to go beyond egalitarian liberalism has real and important implications for legal and institutional engineering. For Sandel, liberal neutrality is not enough.1 To argue for equality of freedom – i.e. freedom from external coercion, freedom to materially pursue one’s ends, and freedom to form and revise one’s ends in an interpersonal context, independent of any particular conception of the good life – is not enough.2 Progressives need dare to rest their arguments for equality and their policy proposals on their substantive vision of the common good. If we agree with Sandel, we should be thinking about designing and proposing legal institutions that decidedly advance the substantive goals we care about, solidarity and fraternity for example, rather than endlessly strive to achieve liberal neutrality. Attractive and inspirational, Sandel’s theory of justice is parsimonious of recommendations for medium level institutional design. It offers little detailed guidance to private lawyers called upon to design background rules for the allocation of scarce resources and necessary burdens. In this essay, I will discuss how Sandel’s theory of justice may help orient the work of lawyers and policymakers interested in a question that is central to recent property debates: the question of the potential of common ownership for social change. ∗ Associate Professor, Boston University School of Law. I am deeply indebted to Talha Syed for years of conversations on property and normative theory and for comments and insights on this paper. I also wish to thank Jed Purdy, David Lyons, and Alon Harel for invaluable comments on this draft, and David Linhart for wonderful research assistance and for an ongoing stimulating dialogue on property and social justice. 1 MICHAEL J. SANDEL, JUSTICE: WHAT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO? (2009) [hereinafter JUSTICE]. 2 On this characterization of freedom, see Talha Syed, Is Welfare the Only Value? Part I (unpublished manuscript) (on file with author). 1359 1360 BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 91: 1359 An often misused term, common ownership is best described as institutional arrangements for the cooperative, i.e. shared, joint, or collective, use or ownership of resources.3 In legal terms, it is a catch-all category that includes joint tenancies, tenancies in common, tenancies by the entirety, and other forms of marital property, partnership property, and corporately-owned property.4 Common ownership is the object of periodic revivals of interest in the legal community. Dismissed by Enlightenment and post-revolutionary thinkers as a medieval relic, common ownership was at the center of a heated debate among European jurists in the late Nineteenth Century.5 For its supporters, it held out promises of equality, freedom, and meaningful work in conditions of fraternity. More recently, scholars are revisiting pessimistic accounts that see common ownership as inevitably leading to waste and overuse, such as Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons”6 or Demesetz’s theory of property evolution from the commons to private property.7 In the United States and in Europe, scholars working from different methodological and political perspectives argue that common ownership should have a more central space in the property law of contemporary liberal democracies.8 Experimental forms of common land ownership and management include land trusts, neighborhood managed parks, community supported agriculture, and limited equity housing cooperatives. If properly designed, these common ownership forms may achieve a variety of policy goals: greater equality in access to necessities such as housing, or valuable resources such as agricultural land; more efficient and sustainable use of environmental resources; and more cooperative, active, and solidaristic communities. However, the design of common ownership forms present a normative dilemma. While common ownership regimes may foster community or allow more equal access to certain resources, they often entail limits to the co- 3 See generally Margaret A. McKean, Common Property: What Is it, What Is it Good For and What Makes it Work?, in PEOPLE AND FORESTS 27 (Clark C. Gibson et al. eds., 2000). 4 See, e.g., Hanoch Dagan & Michael A. Heller, The Liberal Commons, 110 YALE L.J. 549, 552-53 (2001); Carolyn J. Frantz & Hanoch Dagan, Properties of Marriage, 104 COLUM. L. REV. 75, 76-81 (2004). 5 See PAOLO GROSSI, AN ALTERNATIVE TO PRIVATE PROPERTY 9 (1981); Anna di Robilant, “One Property, Many Properties”: Common Ownership and the Disaggregation of Property in 19th Century Europe (unpublished manuscript) (on file with author). 6 Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, 162 SCIENCE 1243, 1243 (Dec. 13, 1968). 7 See generally Harold Demesetz, Toward a Theory of Property Rights, 57 AM. ECON. REV. 347 (1967). 8 See, e.g., YOCHAI BENKLER, THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS (2006); JAMES BOYLE, THE PUBLIC DOMAIN (2008); UGO MATTEI ET AL., INVERTIRE LA ROTTA (2007); Dagan & Heller, supra note 4; Margaret A. McKean, Success on the Commons: A Comparative Examination of Institutions for Common Property Resource Management, 4 J. THEORETICAL POL. 247, 250-53 (1992). 2011] THE VIRTUES OF COMMON OWNERSHIP 1361 owners’ autonomy. Individual co-owners’ abilities to choose and revise their goals, disagree with use or management decisions, and exit are often narrowed to protect and preserve the interest and the project of the majority. Recently, some have noted that common property need not entail a normative trade-off between liberal autonomy and community.9 A properly designed collective proprietary regime should also afford protection to autonomy values by granting strong exit rights.10 Sandel’s theory of justice, with its emphasis on deliberation, intermediate communities, and a substantive notion of the common good, seems ideal to cast light on these issues. Aren’t efforts to outline commons regimes that allow for both community or solidarity and liberal autonomy not only hopelessly doomed to fail but also normatively undesirable and strategically off-target? Aren’t common ownership regimes voluntary, intermediate communities committed to substantive values and hence isn’t the need for liberal autonomy and exit secondary? Shouldn’t we draw common property regimes that decidedly embody values such as community, equality, and solidarity? This paper addresses these questions. In Part I, I briefly outline Sandel’s theory of justice, which I describe as a form of “thick republicanism.” In Part II, I discuss alternative commons regimes, including Professors Michael A. Heller and Hanoch Dagan’s “liberal commons” and an alternative regime designed by an imaginary lawyer less concerned with autonomy and more preoccupied with community and equality. In Part III, I argue that neither regime is likely to balance autonomy and community or equality adequately, and I suggest another way of tackling the commons dilemma. I propose that lawyers interested in the commons as a vehicle for social change combine two insights: the Hohfeldian or Legal Realist concept of property as a bundle of entitlements, and a resource-specific analysis of property entitlements inspired by, among other sources, Sandel’s theory of justice. The way out of the commons impasse may be to start from the type of resource – its nature and characteristics – and to argue about the interests and values it involves in an irreducibly interdependent society as well as its just distribution in order properly to shape the bundle of entitlements. I. SANDEL’S THEORY OF JUSTICE: A “THICK REPUBLICANISM” Sandel’s theory of justice has been described as a form of neo-Athenian republicanism that has its roots in Aristotle and Hannah Arendt.11 For Sandel, republicanism is sharing in self-government, sharing in governing a political community that controls its own fate. It requires civic virtues such as concern for the common good, a capacity for deliberating effectively, and “practical judgment,” i.e. judgment oriented to action – to identifying the highest human 9 See, e.g., Dagan & Heller, supra note 4. 10 Id. at 567. 11 Philip Pettit, Reworking Sandel’s Republicanism, 95 J. PHIL.73, 82-85 (1998). 1362 BOSTON UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 91: 1359 good attainable under the circumstances.12 These virtues are a matter of practice and habit; we learn them by deliberating, by being steeped in civic life.13 First, the teleological and honorific aspect of Sandel’s republicanism make it a “thick republicanism,” as opposed to the “thinner” republicanism that liberals are often willing to endorse. Sandel’s republicanism asks not only about the procedures for moral reasoning – the means for identifying the common good – but also about the nature of the common good. More specifically, Sandel’s inquiry addresses the telos, i.e. the end or purpose, of our social institutions. It asks what substantive values
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