Law after Dominium: Thinking with Martti Koskenniemi on Property, Sovereignty and Transformation

Abstract

To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth describes the work of law and legal thought in the exercise of European power abroad. In focusing on the common features of the exercise of legal imagination across European traditions — on sovereignty and property — it presents the legal discipline with both the persistence of structure and the question of its transformation. In this review essay, I sketch how aspects of this work might open multiple fronts for scholarship, thought and action: through an insistence on holding onto the public and the private in law as two halves of a greater whole; through thinking about legal transformation as aesthetic practice rather than technical task; and through considering the contradictions of law as profession, and the relationship of that profession to past and future change, in a time of a massively changed and changing climate.

Keywords: legal history, property law, law and profession, law and climate