Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land - Hardcover

Mitchell, John Hanson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201442140 ISBN 13: 9780201442144

Publisher: Perseus Books, 1998

Synopsis

Traces the evolution of the idea of private ownership of land from the beginning of British common law up to the most recent Supreme Court takings decisions

About this title

About the Author

John Hanson Mitchell is the author of four books that deal with the natural and human history of a single square mile of land in eastern Massachusetts: Ceremonial Time, Walking Towards Walden, A Field Guide to Your Own Backyard, and Living at the End of Time.

From Kirkus Reviews

A Thoreauvian ramble through English common law, American history, the New England landscape, and much else. Mitchell (Walking Towards Walden, 1995), winner of the John Burroughs Essay Award, takes a sidelong look at our tenure on the American land, contrasting communal-property ideas of the continents indigenes with imported ideas of might and rightideas, he writes, that are really fairly new, dating only to the 18th century, before which time one bought the right to live on a particular piece of land, not the land itself. How do you determine where the boundaries lie exactly while you are out walking, and if you happen to cross an imaginary line, one run out and recorded and set on paper and filed in a registry of deeds, what does it matter? he asks while roving in the Yankee woods of Massachusetts. It matters plenty, he answers, to his good-fences neighbors, who jealously guard their domains with shotguns, writs, and pot-bellied pigs. It matters, too, to history; the domain of the Nashobah Indians, on whose historic ground Mitchell and his neighbors now dwell, is contested by four postage stamp-sized Massachusetts townships. Mitchell is quite at home entertaining the airless abstractions of property law, but hes resolutely (and literally) down-to-earth; to know a place, to know the real map of the world, you have to get out on the land and walk, he notes, and walk he does all over the green fields, turning up a solid piece of nature writing in the bargain. Elsewhere he examines the history of public- and private-domain property rights, tracing them through Anglo-Norman custom into the present and considers the question whether we have the moral right to destroy habitat in order to make room for yet another boxlike development for 60 or 70 or 100 well-heeled families. A thoughtful, beautifully written addition to environmental and regional literature. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Perseus Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0201442140
• ISBN 13: 9780201442144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 295