Property Law and Its Boundaries
Conference Report
The Young Property Lawyers’ Forum (YPLF) Annual Conference 2023 was dedicated to the topic of boundaries in property law. The conference dealt with the topic that boundaries with regard to property law are omnipresent in either delimiting individual property rights or the legal field of property law itself with regard to other areas of legal scholarship or to other academic disciplines. Yet, despite the pervasiveness of boundaries in property law, they are not always easy to find, clear, permanent or uncontested.
To discuss these challenges from a wide range of perspectives, including doctrinal, theoretical and comparative ones, the YPLF invited junior researchers to its 12th annual meeting taking place at the European Legal Studies Institute, Universität Osnabrück, Germany (1–2 June 2023). Co-organisers were Konstanze von Schütz (McGill University/Canada), Aleksa Radonjić (Univerziteta Union/Serbia) and Ernesto Vargas Weil (Selwyn College, University of Cambridge/UK).
The conference consisted of three different panels as well as two keynote speeches: ‘Things’ by Christian von Bar, and ‘On the Origins and Distribution of Land Ownership in Europe and the Colonies’ by Hans Schulte-Nölke.
Dorothea Keiter, PhD researcher in the Department of Marietta Auer, gave a presentation in the panel ‘Disciplinary Boundaries of Property Law’, entitled ‘Boundaries of property through a de-limited public law? The debates about private property and its Limits as a reflection of legal scholarship in the Weimar Republic’. The presentation examined debates of Weimar legal scholars across the public/private law divide with regard to the boundaries of the constitutional right to property, mainly concerning expropriations.
In the panel ‘Conceptual Boundaries of Property Law’, Wenjia Zhao, also PhD researcher in the Department of Marietta Auer, made a presentation about ‘Crossing boundaries and information costs – The reflection on information theorists’ reconstruction of bundle view”, discussing how the boundaries and exclusion strategy helps information theorists in the United States construct their revived ownership property model and also their critique of the traditional ‘bundle-of-rights’ model.