About the Workshop

Public lands, unownable ideas, markets for eggs and surrogates, slaves in court, the economics of sharing . . . . These were some of the issues discussed at this Duke Law School event. The workshop was prompted by the publication of James Boyle’s book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press 2008), but its topic was also a wider one.

There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world.

Blackstone’s quotation is famous. But what of the opposite of property, or rather the opposites of property? What of property’s outside, its antonyms, limitations, negations, its absences? Over the last ten years theorists in very different areas have explored these realms. Some have studied the importance of the limitations on intellectual property, whether those consist of “the public domain” or of a “commons” created by a Creative Commons or free software license. They have studied the distributed creativity that occurs in those places where property is either absent or turned to the ends of sharing. Others have looked at different boundaries on property – at the physical “public domain” of public lands for example, and its role in economic development and environmental protection. Some scholars have focused on the places where we are reluctant to recognize markets or property rights, for example in the economic arrangements around human eggs or reproductive services. Still others have looked at historical moments in the battles over the edges of property rights, such as attempts by slaves to use the language of property and of contracts to gain their freedom and the tangles that antebellum courts wove into the law as a result.

The workshop does not claim some essential common thread links each of these inquiries together. Instead, it offered essayistic contributions from a distinguished and diverse group of panelists and commentators each of whom has, in their own way, explored the margins, the edges, and the opposites of property. Do those different investigations shed light on each other? View the workshop seesions to find out.