Landmark Cases in Property Law

This book explores the development of basic principles of property law in leading cases. Each paper considers a case on land, personal property or intangibles, discussing what that case contributes to the dominant themes of property jurisprudence - how are property rights acquired? What is the content of property rights? What are the limits or boundaries of property? How are property rights extinguished? Individually and collectively, the papers identify a number of important themes for the doctrinal development of property institutions and their broader justification. These themes include: the obscure and incremental development of seemingly foundational principles, the role of instrumentalism in property reasoning, the influence of the law of tort on the scope of property doctrines, and the impact of Roman legal reasoning on the common law of property. One or more of these themes (and others) is revealed through careful case analysis in each paper and they are collected and critically explored in the editors' introduction. This makes for a coherent and provocative collection.

The uncritical realism of realist evaluation

This article is a response to Ray Pawson’s critique of critical realism, the philosophy of science elaborated by Roy Bhaskar. I argue with Pawson’s interpretation of critical realism’s positions on both natural and social science and his charges concerning its totalizing ontology, its arrogant epistemology and its naive methodology. The differences between critical realism and realist evaluation are not as significant as Pawson contends. The main differences between the two realisms lie in their approaches to the relationship between social structures and human agency, and between facts and values. I argue that evaluation scientists need to clearly distinguish structure and agency. They should also make their values explicit. The uncritical approach of realist evaluation, combined with its underplaying of the importance of agency, leaves it open to implication in the abuses of bureaucratic instrumentalism.

The Creativity of Mothering: Intensity, Anxiety and Normative Accountability

This chapter focuses on the question of how to explain agency in the context of motherhood. In so doing, it seeks to go beyond the tendency to focus exclusively on the burden of coordination which institutional structures generate for mothers, in order to examine the evaluative burden which normative structures demand of this role. Drawing on interview material with 40 middle class mothers across two research sites in the UK and US, the paper develops a three-part typology of maternal role performance. This relies on the insights of contemporary action theory, with its emphasis on emotionally configured intersubjective interpretation of normative structures, and more specifically on Joas’s pragmatist theorisation of social action as a creative process. The paper argues that maternal agency takes three distinct ideal-typical forms, namely romantic expressivism, rational instrumentalism, and pragmatism. These are conceived as distinct creative responses to the evaluative demands of motherhood, as the agents go about interpreting situated norms, needs and interests.