Piece Of Property Research Articles

Besoins individuels et collectifs: Nanacatlan, Mexico

The author intends both to describe a native credit institution in a peasant community and to analyse its overt and covert functions. The community fund, managed by the local authority (presidencia auxiliar) is theoretically available to all household heads who can show solvency (e.g., by pawning a piece of property, usually land). Apart from assisting peasants who face a shortage of cash, another overt function of the system is to finance, with the interests which are paid back on the loans, the functioning of the local administration. Because of the great economic discrepancies between peasants (50 per cent of them own no land, while 2.5 per cent own 30 per cent of the land) one real, although covert, function of the credit institution is to channel a substantial amount of cash to the local upper class (which has little access to banking facilities). Therefore it actually enhances their economic domination over the majority of villagers, which fact allows us to understand the strict control they have exerted over the management of the fund since its foundation, some 40 years ago.

The Sale of Offices in Qajar Iran, 1858–1896

Political systems which are able to develop share two general characteristics: first, they show an ability to assimilate political demands, and second, they sustain a dynamic integrity. The study of bureaucracy derives its importance from the essential role it plays in this dual process through its functions of recruitment of new elements on one hand, and socializing the new recruits and providing for the functioning of the system on the other.The sale of offices as a part of this system—maintenance mechanism will be studied here through its functions of recruitment and socialization. I will attempt to study the problem as a subsystem within the larger context of a patrimonial state, and as a natural extension of the concept of an office as a piece of property. Then, I will discuss the reasons for the increase of the sale of offices during the second half of the nineteenth century in Iran, the nature of the sale itself, and finally the effect of it on the Iranian political system.

Looking ahead at instruction in arithmetic

Herbert Hannon of Western Michigan University tells a story of a real-estate agent who was scrupulously honest with his clients. Upon showing a client a piece of property, he pointed out that the bouse was satisfactory, but that t he location had a serious drawback. Two blocks to the west of the house was a brewery; two blocks to the east was a slaughter house. The client agreed that t he location had disadvantages, but asked if there was no advantage to it.

Indian and Ancient Chinese Buddhism: Institutions Analogous to the Jisa

The Tibetan term which is pronounced jisa and written spyi signifies literally terra commune or, like spyi, the principal or capital piece of land. The fact it is not to be found in the classical dictionaries of the Tibetan language, such as those of Sarat Chandra Das and Jäschke, seems to show that it is fairly recent. In these works the terms closest to it are spyi-tor and, better still, spyi-thog, which refer to a common fund or a common piece of property. These terms, too, appear to be relatively recent or at least exclusively Tibetan, for the dictionaries give no Sanskrit equivalent and they suggest that the terms belong solely to the dialects of Western Tibet. The Sanskrit terms corresponding to spyi would be sāmanyabhūmi and sādharanabhūmi in the first and most satisfactory sense, of common land, and agrabhūmi, murdhabhūmi and sirobhūmi in the second sense. But these do not occur in the dictionaries of classic Sanskrit, nor of Buddhist Sanskrit (Edgerton), nor of Pali. Nor were any equivalent expressions either developed in Chinese Buddhism or preserved through Chinese translations of Sanskrit terms. If any Indian or Chinese terms corresponding to the Tibetan spyi-sa existed, they obviously formed no part of the canonical or even of the paracanonical literary language of Indian or ancient Chinese Buddhism. It follows that if Indian or Chinese Buddhism had an institution resembling the Tibetan jisa, the Buddhist monks must have considered it to be foreign to their activities and in some way unworthy.

A Consideration of Copyright

The object of this article is to endeavor to ascertain the nature of the property interest involved in the word copyright. Copyright law is usually treated as an offshoot of patent law-as one of the two queer branches of our jurisprudence in which, by an exception depending on statute, intangible ideas are protected. The dissimilarities are more pronounced than the similarities. One gives a monopoly; the other merely a prohibition against copying-a very different thing. About the only similarity is that both deal with intangible rights against all the world but that is an element which they share with several other branches of the law. They do not even share a common origin in statute rather than custom for it is still debatable whether the original copyright statute-the Statute of Anne '-created a new right or merely limited a pre-existing common-law copyright.2 The most striking feature of copyright is that it is the only branch of the law which contemplates, at least in a normal state of affairs, the existence at the same time of two valid titles to the same piece of property. That is not true of patents. Both these branches of the law start with the proposition that to obtain a valid title to the property which he claims, the author or inventor must have originated it, but in copyright law the word originate is used in a strictly Pickwickian sense. It means, in copyright, that the author thought of what he seeks to have protected all by himself; not that he was the first to think of it.3 The work must be original with the author but it need not be original to the world. The validity of a copyright to a musical figure, for example, is not impaired merely because the same figure is

The Murder of Slaves in Attic Law

IT WAS almost a commonplace among the ancient writers that the slaves at Athens enjoyed a peculiarly happy lot.' But to what extent was their position a matter of custom and to what extent a matter of legal right? There is no doubt that law as well as custom protected the slave so far as he was regarded as a piece of property. But did the law of Athens also recognize the slave as a person, entitled his own right to a certain protection from malicious injury to life and limb? The most recent general treatment of Athenian law, that of Kahrstedt,2 does ample justice to the protection accorded by Athenian law to property slaves. But Kahrstedt apparently thinks that, for Attic law, the slave was merely a valuable kind of property. The slave, he thinks, had no legal capacity whatever. The law allowed his master to take steps to protect him against injury by a third party and to recover damages when such injury had been caused. But it gave the slave no protection against his master: die Strafgewalt des Herrn ist an sich unbegrenzt. Naturally the master's rights over his slave, like his other property rights, were sometimes limited by public law; but the purpose of such limitation was not the protection of the slave's person but the welfare of the state. This is an extreme view which has at least the merit of consistency. The older interpretations are less consistent. Thus Busolt: Der Sklave war daher im allgemeinen keine Rechtspers6nlichkeit; but in Athen durfte kein Sklave ohne gerichtliches Urteil getotet werden.3 Obviously, if the law forbade putting a slave to death without judicial process, then the slave was not quite rightless nor altogether devoid of personality. Lipsius openly attributes inconsistency to Attic law. Der Sklave hat keine Rechtspersonlichkeit; er ist nur Besitztum des 1 Xen. Const. of Athens i. 10; Plato Rep. viii. 563b; Dem. Phil. iii. 3; Plautus Stichus 447-50; Aeschines Timarchus 54; Aristophanes Eccles. 721-22. 2 U. Kahrstedt, Staatsgebiet und StaatsangehMrige Athen (Stuttgart-Berlin, 1934), pp. 133 ff., 139 ff., 321-27.

The Prussian Theory of Monarchy

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when absolute monarchy was the prevailing governmental type in Europe, the principle was very generally held by the rulers, and not infrequently acted upon, that the people of a state, together with their lands and other goods and chattels, were, in a very real sense, the property of their king and constituted his patrimonium. That this view should have prevailed, is historically explainable. The entire feudal system, out of which the modern monarchy had evolved, was founded upon the idea that the ownership of land carried with it, as one of its incidents, the right of political rulership. When, then, by a process of development, the king had obtained a supremacy over his feudal lords, when his “peace” had become higher than theirs, and had extended over the whole country, and when these lords and those who in turn held of them were forced to concede that they held their lands by a conditional grant from the king, their liege lord, the idea that the monarch was the owner of the entire realm was complete. In him lay the final legal title to all land. All other persons had “tenures” rather than rights of ownership. And, as for the people themselves, the idea that one person might be another person's “man” or “woman” was universal. The influence of these ideas on recent political conceptions may be indicated by recalling that serfdom did not disappear from Germany until well into the nineteenth century.This patrimonial conception of monarchy explains the accepted idea that the throne might be inherited, or willed away by testament, like a piece of property, and that it might be bought and sold, and acquired by marriage. It explains also the recognized right of the king to requisition, upon occasion, the goods of his subjects, and even to sell those subjects themselves to foreign powers, as, for example, was done when the Hessian soldiers were sold by their ruler to England for use against the Americans in the Revolutionary War.