Property and Resilience

A Workshop on Vulnerability Theory

Vulnerability theory, a rapidly developing heuristic for addressing pressing socio-legal concerns, permits a deeper and more authentic understanding of how people engage with each other and their communities. It confronts “the reality that we all live and die within a fragile materiality that renders us constantly susceptible to both internal and external forces beyond our control” in order to demand the “responsive state.” This responsive state is tasked with creating and supporting structures and avenues of resilience—i.e. those resources that allow individuals to confront, adapt to, ameliorate the consequences of, compensate for, or contain the vulnerability.

Property law and policy occupies a central—arguably primary—role in resilience. Property provides the infrastructure for politics of exclusion, identity and marginalization. Property allocates, secures, preserves, and maintains privilege and disadvantage. Property operates as the main store of material resources and provides the networks through which other core resources are managed.

This workshop, which will take the form of an extended active dialogue about several core themes/questions, will explore the role vulnerability theory can play in understanding and reimagining property law. The themes/questions for discussion will include:

What role can vulnerability theory play in understanding the role and experience of property, and how the institution is shaped by and shapes progress towards greater resilience.
How can appreciating that vulnerability is the universal human condition impact the core values protected and advanced by the institution of private property?
Who and what are privileged or disadvantaged by the legal institution of private property? How does the discourse of “private” property encourage or inhibit more inclusive forms of resilience?
What specific legal change might vulnerability theory suggest for property law?