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    Liberal contracts, relational contracts and common property : Africa and the United States

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    64_wp15.pdf (172.3Kb)
    Date
    1998
    Author
    Tabachnick, David
    Publisher
    Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    Metadata
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    Abstract
    The core thesis is that Western neoclassical economics and law (particularly Anglo-American) have a peculiar cultural history that biases Western-trained economists and lawyers against common property systems like those found among Africans and American Indians. This Western cultural bias is expressed through the recurrent focus on individuals as atomistic and independent of each other in contract and property law, as well as in economic theory. The bias derives in part from the historical suppression of community property rights that once overlapped individual property rights, as in the case of the enclosure of the commons in England. Well-meaning Western advisors may depart for foreign communities that possess common property systems and year after year, decade after decade, century after century, propose the replacement of existing legal and economic ideas and institutions with Western imports-not realizing the limited utility and contested history, even in the West, of these imported forms. While many of these issues are not new, the oldness of these debates becomes an issue in itself. How does one break the repetitive cycle, the cultural reproduction of bias, by provoking self-assessment?
    Subject
    Natural resources, Communal United States
    Natural resources, Communal Guinea
    Right of property Economic aspects
    Customary law
    Land tenure Law and legislation United States
    Land tenure Law and legislation Guinea
    Menominee Indians Land tenure
    Common property United States
    Common property Guinea
    Permanent Link
    http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/21993
    Description
    iv, 42 p.
    Part of
    • Land Tenure Center Working Papers

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