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As a result of technological progress, established traditional legal concepts require constant refi nement to permit their optimal regulation. For example, virtual (digital) “things” — or tokens (NFTs) — are subject to disputes concerning whether it is preferable to rely on a traditional legal institution (e.g., property and intellectual property) or create a completely new regime “from scratch”. Using historical and comparative legal methods based on doctrinal sources, the present work explores the concepts of thing and property in the common law of nation states. The closest functional analogues in the civil law systems the res (“thing”) and in rem (“right”) are compared. Common law in rem rights are established to have emerged in the Middle Ages in form of the feudal system of different statuses with respect to land (estates). Later, under the infl uence of Wesley Hohfeld’s research on legal opposites and correlatives, this system was substantially modernized through the deconstruction of property into a “bundle of rights”. An analysis of a published translation of Joshua Fairfi eld’s article convincingly demonstrates that cryptocurrency, just as any token, is indistinguishable in its principal aspects from a “thing” in the civil-law sense. A similar conclusion is reached in the context of Russian law: the main criteria of “thingness” — materiality and the possibility of being the object of exclusive possession — are equally fulfi lled when it comes to tokens, land plots or chairs in one’s apartment. Accordingly, intuitive notions about things as products having real nature are obviously outdated and should be replaced with a jurisprudential understanding of the “thing” as a result of social interaction, rather than having a certain nature in and of itself. The important functions of materiality consist in a reduction of information costs for participants in legal relations due to the natural formation of intuitive expectations, as well as prejudices about the scope and characteristics of these rights.

The brown bear reintroduction program in the Pyrenees was launched in 1996, once their population was considered extinct in the central parts of the mountain range. The increasing number of livestock casualties caused by bear attacks forced the public administrations to adopt a package of protection measures, which included hiring mountain shepherds to tend the local farmers' flocks during the summer grazing season. Although these measures were deemed to restore age-old communal shepherding practices that had recently been abandoned by bringing together bears, livestock, and shepherds in the high mountain pastures, the bear program has produced an overlap of communal and state-driven territorialities. Drawing attention to the ambiguous position of mountain shepherds within a new pastoralism-conservation network, situated between local farmers and bear program's decision-makers, this article argues that the commons must be taken into consideration as it persists in current times, even within a high-modern territoriality unfolded under different forms of environmentality. The shepherds epitomize the hybridization of different territorialities, situated on the edge of the production-based economy developed by the local farmers and the amenity-based economy behind the bear reintroduction program. There is a shared, though differentiated capitalist view of natural resources. Using the main theories of power in political ecology and taking the variables of 'format, management, governance, and institution' to frame the commons as an enduring local collective farming resource, this article scrutinizes the collision between the two types of capitalism, usually misidentified as a rural-urban divide. It also shows the extent to which the shifting existence of the commons, crystallized through the ambiguous position of the shepherds, may provide us with a fruitful toolkit to better understanding human-wildlife conflicts based on the cleavage between farming and conservationist sectors.

Feminist scholars and activists have drawn attention to the importance of women's land rights, and studies focused on irrigation have explored the gendered relationships between land and water rights. Yet little of this work has focused on the relationship between land and water rights for domestic and productive purposes more broadly. Within rural communities, women and men have different rights to both land and water. We explore these interconnected relationships using community profiles, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews from two communities as well as survey data collected from multiple adult members of rural households in Kilifi County, Kenya. Using a bundle of rights framework, we find that few individuals hold the complete bundle of rights over water, and the extent to which the rights are acknowledged by others and enforceable varies by the land-water tenure system. The full bundle of rights to water is most likely to be complete and most robust for men who have private water points on household land they hold. Even then, other people may assert claims to water at the water point, although these claims may involve negotiation or payment. Many water rights across the land-tenure systems are shared with others rather than being held by one individual. As such, the ability to negotiate water access is particularly important. The duration of the rights, or the length of time for which the rights are held, is embedded in social relations and exchange, particularly on others' household land. Women more than men seem to maintain a complicated set of social networks that allow them to negotiate for water from other women who manage the water transactions. The process of negotiation needs to be re-articulated each time. Thus, the duration of these rights to water depends on the ongoing relationships.

Commons studies have emphasized the importance of customary rights and informal institutions, arguing that if there is a gap between formal ownership titles and customary rights, then the latter must be respected. However, as customary practices weaken, the influence of state legal systems and registered titles becomes stronger. When the commons is registered under multiple co-owners’ names, the commoners come to believe that they hold a normal common property and keep these rights even after they leave the village. This phenomenon, called legalization, leads to the tragedy of the anticommons because the number of rights holders outside the village increases. This paper explains the underuse of Japanese common property forests due to this legalization, especially in terms of two points derived from microdata analysis of the 2000 census. First, in the case of multiple co-owners, the number of ex-villagers who keep their rights is very high. Second, when ex-villagers keep their rights and the registered name includes multiple coowners, forestry activities are most infrequent. This paper names this situation “Bundle of Rights Reversed,” in which those outside the community have strong rights to prevent change in forest use, and propose the application of a different legal rule. This framework would be useful for a comparative study on the formalization of commons tenure rights.

This article proposes a rereading of the right to the city using an institutionalist approach following the works of Hohfeld, Commons, Marcuse and Ostrom. Section 1 offers a critical analysis of the legacy of Henri Lefebvre's work promoted by radical geography, which has remained too focused on the exercise of collective power over the processes of urbanization. By borrowing the analytical tools crafted by the Bloomington School, the right to the city asserts itself first as a right to the appropriation of urban resources, foremost among which is housing. Section 2 draws on the experience of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust in New York to illustrate the empirical and theoretical significance of this institutionalist rereading of the right to the city. We argue that understanding the diversity of residential property regimes is a promising avenue for finding lasting solutions to the affordable housing crisis, thereby making the right to the city a reality.

The article discusses main problems of of preservation of cultural heritage of St. Petersburg included in the List of monuments of federal significance, that guard UN programs. Raised issues of recovery, restoration, protection and professional assessment of the value of real estate, in particular, the example of the city’s Cathedral of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. The connecting node in the article raised issues and questions turned out to be the subject of a dispute with the Russian Orthodox Church on the ownership of urban real estate.

The article discusses the problems associated with the protection and evaluation of the St. Petersburg-monuments of architecture buildings, which are under state protection, with appropriate protection status - «a monument of history and culture». We also consider the technical issues be included in the market value of the property factor «historical reputation» with three classical approaches to evaluation - cost, income and comparative. Of particular interest is the formation of a project cost of insurance for the purpose of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. In the absence of a proper valuation of methodical maintenance of monuments article authors try to construct an algorithm and a procedure for determining the insurance value of St. Isaac’s Cathedral.

The article explores the origins of the research program on commons, especially as it emerges from the work of Ostrom and the Indiana school. In addition to recalling the discussion that spread around the famous article of Hardin on the “Tragedy of the commons”, the emphasis is put on an essential but little-known episode of the history of the commons: the conference hold in Annapolis in 1983 at the inititiave of the NRC (National Research Council) to review the forms of ownership and rural exploitation in tropical countries that were at that time experiencing severe degradation and a fall in productivity. On this occasion were presented a series of case studies on different types of “commons”. The work achieved during this conference and the developments that will be given after it (notably by Ostrom and the members of the School of Indiana) constitue the main source and origign of the research program on the commons. The paper ends with the presentation of the content and the first theorizings of the new research progarmme.

By adopting a certain approach to property, in terms of a bundle of rights, Ostrom’s work on property opens up a real space for thinking about common property today. This article appraises the significance of Ostrom’s work by situating it within the history of the concept of the bundle of rights and the political and intellectual issues related to that concept. First developed by John Commons and American critical jurists of the early 20th century, this conception of property was then picked up by liberal theorists. By returning to the line advocated by Commons in her bundle of rights approach, Ostrom has overthrown the positions of the “property rights school” to propose a completely new conceptualisation of common property.

Abstract This paper discusses the concept of "property" rights in an interdisciplinary perspective (Law and Economics) in order to compose an analytical conceptual framework to issues related to appropriability involved in public goods (PG) and common pool resources (CPR) analysis. Firstly, we discuss the differences between legal and economic concepts of property rights, trying to integrate economic and legal analytical elements: a right is an opportunity for current or future uses of an asset that is guaranteed by legal system (an enforceable power to maintain the control over economic opportunities). Although economists may not be concerned if some opportunity is guaranteed (or not) by law, nor whether its entitlement is made by means of property or by some other kind of right, these differences also matter for economic analysis. To deal with this question, we need to open the "black box" of the so called "property" rights: a) identifying and analyzing the different ways in which rights are entitled - from a legal perspective (Hohfeld) and in the footsteps of studies analyzing the economic relevance of the differences between property and possession, or property, liability and inalienability (Calabresi and Melamed); b) breaking down the concept of property rights in many faculties and analyzing them as a bundle of rights (Schlager and Ostrom). By way of conclusion, we discuss the possibilities of integrating these approaches and explore some of the implications of the study. From a public policies perspective, a more detailed understanding may assist in policy formulation (e.g., to break down and assign specific rights to different holders, etc.), and designing new forms of entitlements, or even the creation of new "assets" that could become the subject of rights.

This introduction brings together the arguments from the texts of the special section « Transformations of Rural Land and Collective Strategies in the Mediterranean : Between Conflicts and Territorial Resilience », and from the literature, with the aim of showing that Mediterranean land tenure and property-rights topics shares similar entries on both sides of the Mediterranean. This concerns the observations and analyses made on land dynamics together with the methodological and conceptual approaches used in the North and South of the Mediterranean.