Property: (Re)Making Canada
An Open Legal Casebook
Over the decade or more I’ve spent teaching first-year property in a Canadian law school, I have constantly wondered and worried about whether it’s possible for law students to learn legal doctrine while gaining some appreciation for what is, or was, going on around it. Is it possible, in other words, to teach property law as having a history, with all of its violence, conflict, contradictions, and—for some—possibility, while equipping first-year students with the insight and skills to do something worthwhile with the subject matter as lawyers, activists, entrepreneurs, community-builders, decision-makers, or in any other pursuit?
This open, online coursebook for learners and teachers in Canadian law schools is my attempt to resolve those worries, or at least to engage with them in a more productive way. Through several iterations, the book has become a kind of uneasy marriage between history text, problem-based practice manual, and conventional law school casebook. Or maybe they are more like roommates for a term. But while most digital texts these days are basically blue-lit vestiges of their better, hardbound selves, I think the best contribution of this project might be that it really tries to embody its digital form. We used to talk enthusiastically about “hypertexts”; not so much anymore. For some, the book’s layered structure will feel like overkill. For others, it may be one means to slightly more clarity amid a lot of inherent complexity.
From the many frameworks teachers use to organize their property courses, I have settled lately on one that asks how property has contributed to “making” Canada since its earliest colonial origins, while simultaneously seeking to challenge students to think about what is needed to “remake” a new context for property Canada, addressing head-on its ongoing contributions to dispossession, inequality and other manifestations of injustice.
In its current version the coursebook is concerned almost entirely with land, because that is the topic I know the best and care about the most. At some point, I or someone else might expand the book to cover topics in copyright, patent, trademark, etc. But for the time being what it has to say about intellectual property is mainly built into its bones. It is published under the Creative Commons CC BY NC SA 4.0 license, meaning that anyone is free to share and adapt the content with attribution for non-commercial use, except as otherwise noted in the text. Several components of the book are themselves adapted from other open legal resources published under the same licence.
For those who want to go even further down the open road, the tech stack used to build and host the book follows an increasingly popular “docs as code” approach to online publishing that employs the very same tools and processes as those used by open-source software creators. This means that not only is the content management system (Hugo) open and free to use; the whole thing is hosted in Markdown as plain text on GitHub, freeing it from convoluted and opaque databases or other systems that make it difficult or impossible to take one’s data somewhere else. With some know-how and a bit of experimentation, you can fork the repository yourself and start creating and publishing an adaptation of the book in something like an afternoon.
— Jamie Baxter, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University