The Making of Modern Property

Anna di Robilant is Professor of Law at Boston University. A legal scholar trained in Europe and in the United States, she has published extensively on the history and theory of modern property law. She is the chair of the property section of the 'Common Core of European Private Law', a project that brings together more than 200 legal scholars and practitioners to analyse and map the connections and underlying similarities in contract, property, and torts laws across Europe.

• Part I. Introduction: The Romanist-bourgeois property culture: dominium, the social function and resources; 1. What Roman antiquity had to offer: a scientific method and a vast inventory of property concepts; 2. The foundations of Romanist-bourgeois property: Robert Joseph Pothier and the transition from medieval 'divided dominium' to modern absolute dominium; 3. Crafting Romanist-bourgeois property: Roman antiquity, political reaction, a rising bourgeoisie and scientism; 4. Reform, not revolution: modernizing property in Germany; 5. The tensions of absolute property; 6. Roman dominium in the republics of Latin America: property, nationhood, race and economic development; 7. The social critics: the critique of absolute dominium and the retrieval of the Roman social doctrines; Conclusions.

'In this ambitious monograph Anna di Robilant describes how European jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew from the doctrines of Roman classical law and ius commune traditions in order to craft a new 'Romanist-bourgeois' form of property.… impressive.' Joshua Getzler, Comparative Legal History