Principles of Property Law

Alison Clarke is a property lawyer who started out as a solicitor in private practice specialising in commercial land transactions, but has spent most of her career teaching property law principles, mainly at the Faculty of Law in the University of Southampton and at the Faculty of Laws at University College London, but also at law schools in Germany, France, China and Japan. She teaches and writes on property law from a comparative perspective, with special interests in communal, collective and co-operative resource use, plural property rights systems and indigenous land rights, and the role of property law in regulating our relationships with the natural and built environment. For many years, she has also co-edited one of the leading practitioner textbooks on land transactions in England and Wales. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Law in the School of Law at the University of Surrey.

• Preface; Table of Cases; 1. What Property Is and Why It Matters; 2. Conceptions and Justifications; 3. Allocation of Property Rights; 4. Property and Human Rights; 5. Ownership and Other Property Interests; 6. New Property Interests and the Numerus Clausus; 7. Objects of Property Interests; 8. Property Interest Holders; 9. Multiple Property Rights Systems: Recognition of Indigenous Land Rights; 10. Limitations on Property; 11. Possession and Title; 12. Adverse Possession of Land; 13. Non-possessory Land Use Rights; 14. Acquiring Interests Informally; 15. Enforceability and Priority of Property Interests: General Principles; 16. Registration; 17. Leases; Index.

'Principles of Property Law is a worthy addition to the Law in Context series. Beautifully written in a simple style, pitched at students who are new to property law, this is in fact much more than an introductory text. It provides a vivid and scholarly account of complex theories and philosophies of property, illustrating and critiquing them through the use of examples from real life and from legal provisions. Although the focus is on English law, the author usefully brings in comparative examples from a range of other jurisdictions. The book is very carefully structured so that the reader is moved from the general to the particular ('Registration' and 'Leases' are the last two chapters) without losing sight of the various theoretical approaches, a thread which holds the whole book together.' Sarah Blandy, University of Sheffield