Property: (Re)Making Canada

Over more than a decade teaching the first-year property law course in a Canadian law school, I have wondered and worried about whether it’s possible for law students to learn something of legal doctrine while gaining an appreciation for what goes on all around it. In other words, can we teach property as having a history with its violence, contradictions, absurdities, and—for some—possibilities, while equipping the students with real technical skills to actually do something with the subject matter as lawyers, activists, entrepreneurs, political leaders?

This open, online casebook 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 a series of historical vignettes, a problem-based field guide and a conventional law school casebook. Or maybe they are more like roommates for a term. But whereas digital texts these days are largely 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 structure will feel like overkill. For others, it may be a means to slightly more clarity amid a lot of inherent complexity.

Among the many frameworks teachers use to organize a property course, I have settled lately on one that asks how property has contributed to “making” Canada since its earliest colonial origins, while also challenging students to think about what might be necessary to “remake” a new context by addressing head-on property’s contributions to inequality and injustice.

In its present phase 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 of open-source software creators. This means that not only is the content creation and management system (Hugo) open and free to use; the whole thing is hosted in Markdown as plain text on GitHub, freeing it from convoluted databases or other systems that make it difficult or impossible to take the data somewhere else. With some know-how and a bit of experimentation, you can fork the repository yourself and start creating and publishing your own adaptation of the book in something like an afternoon.

— Jamie Baxter, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University