Tola Amodun (University of East Anglia (UEA)) has posted Hope in Property (or The ‘Hopefulness’ of Property)? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Hope is arguably a basis for understanding law broadly defined and has utility in shaping expectations or at least anchoring the ‘not yet’. In this way hope becomes the intercessor between aspiration and realization; one of the accepted functions of the law. Property law broadly defined, remains primarily a response to individual claims. Yet these same property rules – especially those anchored in the common law tradition, have historically been sufficiently malleable to accommodate, ‘a future we can only imagine’ (n 17 below). The paper focuses on whether we might use the construct of hope to (better) understand land law rules in the quest for a more inclusive meaning of property law.