Lawful Forest

Cristy Clark is an Associate Professor of Law in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her research focuses on legal geography, the commons, and the intersection of human rights, neoliberalism, activism and the environment. John Page is a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research explores the diversity of property in the common law tradition, and how property intersects with public space and the materiality of place.

The Lawful Forest is an important contribution to legal history, one that may alter perceptions of the natured history of law for those of conventional property scholarship as well as those more akin to critical property studies, decolonial and post-Marxist scholarship. The work is important for anyone working on understanding the history of the common law and its connection with property forms, where lost accounts of the shaping of black-letter law can be just as useful for a property law professor as for their students.The connecting of custom, nature and community in this text, offers an invaluable archive of all those past and future, in the task of a ‘figurative yearning for a spatial life lived better’ (39).

• IntroductionA Theory of the ForestThe Ancient ForestA Glimpsed UtopiaA Concrete UtopiaEcological CommunesA Future DystopiaIndex