About the Course

About the Course

What is this course about? #

This course is an introduction to property law in Canada. “Property” is notoriously difficult to define, but a good starting point and working definition for our purposes is: “respected relationships with land and between people with regard to land, and sometimes other things.” Our focus is on property as it has emerged and changed in the Anglo-Canadian tradition, often in relation to other legal traditions which it encounters and—more than we acknowledge–on which it often depends.

But this course is also more than a survey of Canadian property law. It is about the history of property in the “making” of Canada: as a colonial imaginary at the intersection of imperial relations, as a federated territorial nation-state straining to construct an industrial economy from an essentially extractive one, as a contemporary bastion of global market liberalism. As such, and despite the longstanding divide between “private law” subjects (property, contract, tort) and “public law” subjects (constitutional, criminal, administrative), this course is as much about the public dimensions of state formation and change in Canada and about networked relations between nations as it is about legal relations between private persons. The central premise of the course is that property is a critical and necessary lens through which to understand how Canada was made (not discovered).

How is this course designed and organized? #

As a learner in this course, it isn’t important for you to understand the details of every pedagogical concept and tool employed to create this course as a unique approach to the study of first-year property. But a brief sketch of those concepts and tools will help you to orient yourself in the course and explain why this coursebook is organized in the way it is.

The key point to emphasize is that this is a digital coursebook—one impossible to replicate in print form. It’s basic structure–familiar to anyone and everyone on the Internet–is a “hypertext” that presents and organizes a set of materials in ways that are accessible from different perspectives or entry-points, and along different learning pathways.

History meets doctrine #

Why design a property law text in such a non-linear way? Because there are at least two fundamental ways to study a legal subject like “property”: (1) a doctrinal approach, in which whole legal doctrines (nuisance, servitudes, expropriation) are learned wholly and in succession, or (2) an historical approach, in which slices of intersecting doctrines are studied together within discrete periods of time, in order to better situate them in relation to what else is happening contemporaneously in the world. Print media force teachers and learners to choose between these approaches, and standard practice for most law school courses in the common law tradition has overwhelmingly favoured the former.

A digital coursebook offers the possibility of combining these two approaches in a single course without having to choose between them. Each weekly or bi-weekly lesson explores property’s role in making Canada during a particular era. As we build up our understanding of different doctrinal areas through this historical narrative, the coursebook also provides a more conventional view on our subject matter, collecting and presenting the cases, statues and other materials in standard doctrinal categories. By the end of the course, the book will enable you to see the multiple connections between the material not visible from either an historical or a doctrinal approach alone.

Working through the problem #

Each lesson in the coursebook is organized around an applied problem that challenges you to put what you read into practice. This problem-based model dovetails with the dual historical-doctrinal approach described above by (1) focusing our study of messy, real-world history on a tangible legal dispute while (2) supporting a genuine exploration of the material, recognizing that legal problem-solving admits multiple strategies and answers.

Putting property in place #

One final aspect of this coursebook makes it unique to conventional designs: it expresses a commitment to teaching and learning about property situated in place. The idea here is that property concepts, rules and practices often have an intimate relationship to the geographies where they are enacted–so that to truly understanding what property means and what property does, it makes sense to study property in a particular place-based context. Of course, there are many different ways to define the relevant “place” for this context. For us, this will involve the overlapping spaces in which Dalhousie University is situated: Mi’kma’ki, Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia and Halifax–and perhaps others along the way.

This place-based approach does not mean that we will only study the law in one particular local jurisdiction like Nova Scotia. Our main focus is on property’s role in “making” Canada over the course of its history and in order to address this focus we will explore a range of materials both domestic and international. But to the extent possible, we will develop our story through the lens of events and developments with a special relationship to our current place.

Now that you understanding a bit of the basic architecture for this course, you should review the Coursebook User Manual. This will provide you with a step-by-step guide to navigating the different sections and organizational components of the book as you engage with the reading materials and prepare for our twice weekly meetings.