This article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood have f... more This article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood have found promise in the opportunities that property law provides for addressing community problems. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines the creation of neighborhood institutions for Chicago's first urban agriculture district. These institutions have been informed by memories of slavery and sharecropping, and of the role played by food production and economic cooperation in struggles for African American self-determination. To keep ownership, use, and benefits of urban farmland local, organizers in Englewood founded a community land trust as a way to cultivate a sense of community ownership and control, and as a way to chip away at the alienation that blocks residents from addressing local problems. Prior studies have linked collective efficacy and residents' individual sense of ownership; the experience in Englewood points to how collective efficacy could also be fostered by institutions that demonstrate collective, African-American ownership of community resources. The article discusses why organizers and residents in race-class subjugated communities may find promise in the sense of sovereignty and legal agency afforded by property. K E Y W O R D S : property; land use; collective efficacy; legal cynicism; urban agriculture. Over the past twenty years, urban sociologists have found that residents of neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage tend to be more cynical toward law and its potential to solve local problems than people living in other places. Legal cynicism, a concept initially proposed to describe a place-based sense of moral anomie (Sampson and Bartusch 1998), has motivated a productive series of studies into the causes and consequences of residents' reluctance to call on law to solve community problems. These have found, among other things, that legal cynicism is associated with higher I thank the many growers, advocates, and activists in Chicago who shared their experiences of the promise and the challenges of growing food in the city. Ajay Mehrotra's invitation to be a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation provided time and space to develop this article, which benefited greatly from comments and suggestions from
Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America's cities, hunti... more Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America's cities, hunting for the commons. Along the way, a new common sense has cropped up, which takes urban farms and community gardens as prototypical examples of the urban commons. Farm fields and garden plots produce not only vegetables, the argument goes, but also opportunities for residents to access and use land as a shared, decommodified resource. As both social practice and emergent institutional reality, such urban commons challenge and are challenged by the logics of public and private property that dominate our cities' legal landscapes.
This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.
How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort... more How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet sociolegal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.
This article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood have f... more This article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood have found promise in the opportunities that property law provides for addressing community problems. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines the creation of neighborhood institutions for Chicago's first urban agriculture district. These institutions have been informed by memories of slavery and sharecropping, and of the role played by food production and economic cooperation in struggles for African American self-determination. To keep ownership, use, and benefits of urban farmland local, organizers in Englewood founded a community land trust as a way to cultivate a sense of community ownership and control, and as a way to chip away at the alienation that blocks residents from addressing local problems. Prior studies have linked collective efficacy and residents' individual sense of ownership; the experience in Englewood points to how collective efficacy could also be fostered by institutions that demonstrate collective, African-American ownership of community resources. The article discusses why organizers and residents in race-class subjugated communities may find promise in the sense of sovereignty and legal agency afforded by property. K E Y W O R D S : property; land use; collective efficacy; legal cynicism; urban agriculture. Over the past twenty years, urban sociologists have found that residents of neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage tend to be more cynical toward law and its potential to solve local problems than people living in other places. Legal cynicism, a concept initially proposed to describe a place-based sense of moral anomie (Sampson and Bartusch 1998), has motivated a productive series of studies into the causes and consequences of residents' reluctance to call on law to solve community problems. These have found, among other things, that legal cynicism is associated with higher I thank the many growers, advocates, and activists in Chicago who shared their experiences of the promise and the challenges of growing food in the city. Ajay Mehrotra's invitation to be a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation provided time and space to develop this article, which benefited greatly from comments and suggestions from
Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America's cities, hunti... more Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America's cities, hunting for the commons. Along the way, a new common sense has cropped up, which takes urban farms and community gardens as prototypical examples of the urban commons. Farm fields and garden plots produce not only vegetables, the argument goes, but also opportunities for residents to access and use land as a shared, decommodified resource. As both social practice and emergent institutional reality, such urban commons challenge and are challenged by the logics of public and private property that dominate our cities' legal landscapes.
This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.
How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort... more How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet sociolegal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.
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This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.
This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.