In Person | Property and Despotism: Public and Private

John Austin Seminars - Property and Despotism: Public and Private 

Speaker: Christopher Essert, Professor and Associate Dean, JD Program, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law

Chair: George Letsas, Professor of the Philosophy of Law, UCL Laws 

About the Seminar:

In this paper Professor Essert explores the relationship between, on the one hand, Blackstone’s notion of property as a 'sole and despotic dominion’ and, on the other, what seems to him to be the core principle of public law (or perhaps of public power in a liberal democracy more generally), that public power (in general and in every particular instance) cannot be exercised arbitrarily but instead must be exercised only for (public) purposes consistent with the reason for which it exists.

Putting these two ideas together suggests that, contrary to a widely shared but somewhat pre-theoretic view, public authorities (including the Crown) cannot own land in the same sense that a private person can own land. In particular, that means that it should not be possible for public authorities to bring claims in tort for trespass, since trespass can be exercised (despotically, arbitrarily) for any reason or no reason at all. Instead, any instance of exclusion from or regulation of permissible uses of public space should be understood through a public law model, where there needs to be a valid public reason for the exclusion or regulation. He will also try to show why this proposal is not as radical as it seems, and how it generates a particularly attractive structure for thinking about mixed cases of quasi-public property.

About the Speaker: 

Christopher Essert, BA (McGill), JD (Toronto), LLM, JSD (Yale Law School) is a Professor at the Faculty of Law and the Associate Dean of the JD Program. He teaches and researches in private law, property and tort theory, and legal and political philosophy.

He is the author of Property Law in the Society of Equals (Oxford University Press, 2024). His work has appeared in journals including Philosophy & Public Affairs, Legal Theory, Law & Philosophy, Jurisprudence, the McGill Law Journal, and the University of Toronto Law Journal. 

Professor Essert serves as a member of the International Advisory Panel for the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement of the Law (Fourth), Property and has  participated in consultations regarding the National Housing Strategy. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the School of Cities.

Prior to joining the UofT Faculty of Law, Professor Essert was Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University, and a Visiting Professor at UCLA School of Law. He also served as law clerk to Justice Michel Bastarache at the Supreme Court of Canada, and articled at Paliare Roland LLP.

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