The epilogue briefly surveys important topics in computational complexity that aren’t covered in the book. This includes fine-grained complexity, parameterized complexity, proof complexity, expander graphs, harmonic analysis, program size complexity, complexity of counting, arithmetic complexity, property testing, and quantum computing.

‘Property and the Irish Novel’ begins from the premise that the history of Ireland in the nineteenth century, particularly from the Famine onwards, can be understood as a struggle over possession of land. Changes in the understanding of land, and landowning, in the period can be traced in the arc of novels stretching from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), which establishes the template for the castle novel, to later novels including Charles Lever’s Lord Kilgobbin (1872). The involvement of the landowning class in the writing of fiction complicates this situation, in a figure such as Mary Letitia Martin, who was both a novelist, and the inspiration for the heroine of Lever’s The Martins of Cro’ Martin (1856), after she perished while trying to aid her tenants during the Famine. It is the Irish Famine, perhaps more than any other event, that sharpens the ethical concerns of later castle novels.

Chapter 7 presents a critical and nuanced analysis of Kadiatou Siby v. Mali. This pioneering case addresses state responsibility for discrimination against widows and violations of their rights to housing, property, and dignity. The Siby case is especially notable because it is among the few rulings on widows’ rights by the ECOWAS Court and establishes an original international precedent for widows’ rights in Africa. However, although the applicants invoked some provisions of the Maputo Protocol, the specific provisions explicitly outlining the rights of widows were not included. In addition to examining how much the Court relied on the due diligence principle to hold Mali accountable for the violations, the chapter highlights the implications of neglecting relevant and context-specific provisions of the Maputo Protocol in cases like Siby on the Protocol’s scope and influence. It proposes potential solutions to address this gap.

The rise of generative AI (GenAI) systems trained on content harvested by web-scraping bots threatens the economic viability of the open web. Current legal challenges, often focused on copyright law, fail because the fair use defense allows for uncompensated exploitation. This chapter proposes a new legal framework: reconceptualizing a website – specifically its domain name and underlying architecture – as personal property with a strong right to exclude. This shifts the focus from the content to the container. By arguing that GenAI scraping impairs a website’s value (traffic, ad revenue, subscriber potential) as an economic asset, this approach revitalizes the common law tort of trespass to chattels (Restatement (Second) of Torts § 218). This strategy would empower website owners to enforce exclusionary rights and compel AI companies to negotiate for licenses, ultimately fostering a more sustainable and equitable digital ecosystem.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

Attempts to register and control the populations of the east left a documentary record that was often extremely local. Provincial subjects proved astute readers and compilers of local documentation, which they rearranged in order to make claims of right. These claims can be mined for their underlying legal ideologies. Provincial subjects imagined law not as an abstract system, but as a running list of privileges and disabilities. Rights emerged from having the most correct or most persuasive hermeneutic for making sense of collections of documents in dialogue with officials, through the process of generating legal paperwork. Archives were not merely repositories of external facts about the world: they were collections of arguments that could be made. Law emerged from the collaborative process of claiming such rights.

This chapter examines the presence of women in the Roman census and its socio-economic and political implications during the Republic. In the professio, citizens sui iuris had to declare their name, age, offspring, place of residence, occupation and properties. Viduae (a term including not only widows but also women who were no longer married) and women sui iuris also submitted census declarations. Special lists existed, for instance, of viduae and female wards, who were subject to specific taxes, namely, the aes equestre et hordiarium. This study explores the nature of the information recorded about female citizens in the census and the ways in which they were categorized. In sum, it argues that Roman female citizens should be included into a history of the census and taxation during the Roman Republic, rather than being treated as a marginal or overlooked group.

During the Roman Republic, almost all women without living fathers required the authorization of a male tutor (‘guardian’) for certain important legal and property transactions. This chapter examines the legal rules and lived reality of tutela mulierum (‘guardianship of women’) during the Republic. First, it outlines Roman women’s property rights and the circumstances in which a woman required her tutor’s auctoritas (‘authorisation’). Next, it considers the different types of tutor, how they were appointed and how these factors affected women’s financial freedom. Finally, it explores the variability of women’s experience of tutela, depending on the type of tutor(s) a woman had, as well as their personality and the nature of the transaction the woman wanted to perform. The chapter concludes that, although tutela might be a mere formality for some women, for others it could be a real burden and an impediment to disposing of their property as they wished.

This chapter explores the relationships between regulations (laws, senatorial decrees) and female visibility in Republican Rome. The focus is on the earliest epigraphic and literary evidence for regulations mentioning women, citizen and non-citizen. Key examples include the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BCE), one of the Clusium Fragments (late second to early first century BCE), the lex Osca Tabulae Bantinae (100–91 BCE), the Tabula Heracleensis (post-Social War), the lex Coloniae Genetivae (59 to 44 BCE), as well as Cicero’s references to a lex on female mourning from the XII Tabulae (Twelve Tables), the lex Voconia of 169 BCE and the pontifical responsum and senatus consultum on the Vestal Licinia in 123 BCE. These are compared with Republican regulations attested in later sources. This chapter argues that these regulations rendered some women visible, both physically and symbolically, and that they offer us valuable insight into women’s agency, authority and property in the Roman Republic.

Divine Truthmaker Simplicity (DTS) avoids collapsing God into a metaphysical property by arguing that, to identify God with God’s wisdom, goodness (etc.) is not to identify God with a property, but rather to claim that God is the truthmaker for the predication “God is wise” (etc.). DTS has been the target of a number of recent objections. This chapter explains how Aquinas’s often overlooked distinction between two ways in which a thing can have a perfection – essentially and by participation – enables a response to these objections.

After the installation of a liberal constitution, the socialist tilt in the aftermath of independence challenged some of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution, particularly the right to property, culminating in the removal of the right in the 1970s. Apart from noting the consequences of this, the chapter explores the effects of judicial hyperactivity manifest in public-interest litigation, as well as instances of overt judicial deference to the state. The other theme of the chapter follows the market orientation accompanying the 1991 economic liberalization, with the prominent challenge residing in the incapacity of the law and legal structures to govern long-term investment contracts. It is argued that the response – the creation of multiple regulatory bodies – resulted not only in fragmenting the law but also in raising generic social costs. The conclusion reinforces the narratives highlighted over the chapter by looking at arbitral awards imposed on India on account of international investment disputes.

In principle, economic development can be environmentally sustainable and compatible with the rights of the poor to the commons – forests, water and land. In practice, however, the economic transformation of India since independence – rapid increase in agricultural productivity, industrialization, urbanization and the building of much-needed infrastructure, has come at the expense of environmental degradation and the rights of the poor to common property resources. Indian economic policy has for the most part favoured ‘development’ over environmental concerns. But India is a democracy in which civil society and the people can protest and exert pressure to prevent environmental degradation and defend their rights to the commons. The Indian judiciary, the Supreme Court in particular, has also been proactive in intervening to protect the environment. As of now, the impetus toward natural-resource-intensive and polluting growth is winning the day, but the struggle to find a better balance continues. Climate change is making the task much harder.

The introduction outlines the historical problem central to this book. Namely, the question of what it meant to possess. The question loomed large in the eighteenth century because more people owned more things (particularly moveable property), the social function of movable property was shifting and in the commercial age, the law was often uncertain as to what could be owned and how. The introduction shows how the book seeks to explore the problem of what it meant to possess by examining how people responded to the loss of possessions.

This coda takes the form of a sample judgment that rewrites Baron and Others v Claytile (Pty) Limited and Another [2017] to tangibly illustrate the promise of Alter-Native Constitutionalism. Contrasted with the real-life judgment issued by the Constitutional Court, which relied on liberal approaches, the Alter-Native ‘judgment’ gives willing courts the necessary tools to enforce the ‘property’ rights of ‘non-owners’ and thus highlights the opportunities for equitable solutions the Court has missed, including in its real-life judgment. Emphasizing the importance of robustly applying Ubu-Ntu (rather than the insipid ‘ubuntu’ that scholars and the Court have substituted for it) and applying Ntu Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation developed earlier in the book, the opinion demonstrates existing possibilities for recognising shared rights and promoting housing as a relational, spatiotemporal ‘existence’. By reinterpreting constitutional and legislative provisions to respect indigenous onto-epistemological perspectives on land-as-housing, the Alter-Native opinion demonstrates a transformative approach to ‘property law’ that inherently critiques the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the ‘property’ and ‘housing’ clauses largely to the exclusion of vernacular law. This Alter-Native opinion thus presents a literally embodied argument for the need for broadening restitution, addressing both enduring injustices and future possibilities over multiple generations.

Introducing the book’s third essential part on ‘property’, this chapter sets out Alter-Native Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation informed by vernacular law and oriented towards the everyday, ordinary South African as the ‘reasonable’ person in law. It draws on ethnography and sociolinguistics, problematising the continuities in how democratic South African law treats ‘customary law’ consistently with colonial-apartheid. A SiSwati conversation with Make Ng’Gogo frames the chapter’s exploration of vernacular law’s indigenous ethical orientation, embodied in Ubu-Ntu, as it applies to guiding not only societal organisation but also land rights – emphasising human-centred values over individualistic property rights. By first examining indigenous normative relationships with land then translating their application into critique of Constitutional Court interpretive practices, the chapter advances an Alter-Native framework that represents a paradigm shift in constitutional interpretation, privileging Ubu-Ntu’s holistic world-sense. This framework advocates reinterpretation of dignity and rights under the Constitution, moving beyond Western legal principles toward a jurisprudence grounded in indigenous natural law and relational ethics. The chapter argues for South Africa’s Constitutional Court to adopt this indigenously transformative constitutional approach to interpretation, treating vernacular law as equally legitimate to European ‘common law’ and thereby making truly transformative socioeconomic outcomes more possible.