Studies in Legal History

Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good

Susan Reynolds

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807895863
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Historia jurídica

In this concise history of expropriation of land for the common good in Europe and North America from medieval times to 1800, Susan Reynolds contextualizes the history of an important legal doctrine regarding the relationship between government and the institution of private property. Before Eminent Domain concentrates on western Europe and the English colonies in America. As Reynolds argues, expropriation was a common legal practice in many societies in which individuals had rights to land. It was generally accepted that land could be taken from them, with compensation, when the community, however defined, needed it. She cites examples of the practice since the early Middle Ages in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and from the seventeenth century in America. Reynolds concludes with a discussion of past and present ideas and assumptions about community, individual rights, and individual property that underlie the practice of expropriation but have been largely ignored by historians of both political and legal thought.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

1.1 THE PROBLEM OF ORIGINS

In October 1905 F. W. Maitland wrote a letter to the secretary of the Selden Society in which he remarked:

I have often wondered where the Americans found their eminent domain—or rather how they came to borrow just this from the continental sources. Has it ever struck you that what protected us against this was the completeness of our feudalism? Unquestionably we all hold of the King, but the lord has no right to “expropriate” the tenant. Just because there is supreme landlordship there is no eminent domain in the foreign sense.¹

Maitland died just over a year later, so that, what with his teaching, involvement with the Selden Society, writing the life of Leslie Stephen, and struggling with illness, it is not surprising that he never got around to exploring the history of eminent domain. In the century since he wrote those words, various people have engaged with bits of the subject, but no one seems to have attempted a general history of what can better be called “expropriation of land for the common good.” I prefer not to call it “eminent domain” in the American fashion for three reasons: first, because the expression seems to have come into use in the United States only from the 1790s and to have been restricted to the United States;² second, because the American usage slightly distorts the meaning given to the term by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), from whom it is derived; and third, because it can be taken to imply that land may be taken because the state holds a superior layer of property right. That, I shall argue, never seems to have been its justification. The common British use of “compulsory purchase” is even more odd, since what is compulsory is surely the sale, not the purchase. I have therefore decided to follow the civil law tradition, which uses the word “expropriation” or its equivalent (e.g., espropriazione, expropiación, Enteignung), unless I need to draw attention to a word in the source I cite. This essay does not attempt a complete history of expropriation for the common, or public, good. All it does is attempt to open up the subject and suggest lines of future research. It starts with the earliest evidence I have found but ends in 1800, after which there is much more material that has already been written about extensively by lawyers and legal historians.

Much legal history has been written to follow up Maitland’s discoveries and suggestions about medieval law. Some of it has shown that he made mistakes, but none of the mistakes have shaken my belief that the combination of historical imagination with deep and exact learning makes him the greatest of legal historians and one of the greatest historians of the Middle Ages. I remain convinced of that even though, having been drawn into the subject of expropriation by the remark I quoted, I have to start by saying that his suggestion about its absence from England was inexplicable—even nonsensical. Whatever he meant by “eminent domain in the foreign sense,” it is difficult to see any real difference between that and what, even if he had not thought about earlier expropriations ostensibly made for the public good, he must have known as the taking of land for railways. I shall also argue that feudalism, whether in England or elsewhere, seems to have had very little to do with it at any date. Such evidence as I have found does not support either the belief of the American judge who in 1935 saw the right of eminent domain as a relic of feudalism³ or Maitland’s guess that feudalism might have protected the English against expropriation by governmental authority. I am comforted by the fact that his remarks were merely thrown out casually in a letter to a friend and also by my suspicion that he would have been more interested in new information and hypotheses than in having his casual guess confirmed or rejected.

So far as historians have been interested in expropriation for what is claimed to be the common good, they have generally concentrated on its modern history, since the building of railways, roads, and airports and the demolition of slums or planning of towns have made it both common and contested. Its history before 1800 is problematical. Those who have studied it have tended either to start with Grotius and later writers on natural law or to go back to the recovery of Roman law and the rise of communal activity in twelfth-century Europe.⁴ I suggest that the history of expropriation for the common good is longer, more complicated, and much wider than either of these explanatory outlines implies.

My hypothesis is that in any settled society in which individuals or groups have acknowledged rights in particular pieces of land there may be some occasions, like the digging of drainage or irrigation channels, or the building of roads or fortifications, on which such rights may come into conflict with the needs of the community as a whole, however it is defined and ruled. Different societies may have different ways of reconciling the rights of individuals with the needs of the group, according to their different economies and legal systems; some societies may have several different ways of doing so, according to the nature of the conflicting interests; and some may have no accepted way of taking land from individuals for collective use. I do not claim that expropriation for the common good is found in every society where individuals have rights in land, but only that I have found enough evidence of it in enough societies to make looking for it worthwhile.

For land to be taken from individuals, but only for the supposed good of the community and in return for some kind of compensation, implies that the individuals whose land is taken have rights in it that are recognized by their society. Historians have sometimes denied that particular past societies allowed individuals to have rights in land that amounted to what the historians considered real or true rights of property. Some have maintained that under régimes that seemed strange to them, such as those they called “Oriental Despotism” and “Feudalism,” all the land belonged to the rulers, whether emperors, kings, or chiefs, so that none of their subjects had defensible rights in the land they occupied. These simplistic views of societies and rights that looked strange to outsiders have not been confirmed when measured against the various rights and obligations actually attached to land in practice in any particular society. According to the anthropologist Lucy Mair, Europeans who arrived in some African societies found nobody who could say, or was interpreted to mean, “I own this land, and if you want to buy it I am the man to apply to.” The Europeans, she says, might then conclude that “Primitive land rights are communal.” If, on the other hand, they were told that the chief owned the land and maybe that he owned everything in it, they concluded that no one else had any rights in it against him.⁵ As she and others have shown, neither conclusion was justified. Rights in land are never absolute, but their limitations differ in different societies. They are limited in our own, even if they are dignified by words like “true property rights,” or “ownership,” as “understood in a mature legal system.”⁶ In order to judge whether land is held by what can be considered real or true rights of property that are worth comparing with those with which we are familiar, we need to look at them more closely. They need to be analyzed by separating the bundles of rights that are taken for granted in different societies, including our own, into specific rights and obligations that seem to be attached to land and maybe to different classes of landholding.⁷ In considering expropriation for the common good, the first point to consider is whether individuals in the society one is looking at have rights in land that are judged to be valid in that society. If so, one question to be tackled is whether any particular bundle of rights, or any particular piece of land, although considered to deserve protection in the society concerned, was nevertheless vulnerable to expropriation. The next question is whether the expropriated landholder was supposed to be compensated. The rules about expropriation I have found or, more often, deduced from practice in the parts of western Europe where I have looked for it do not seem to have varied according to the varying status of land or landholder. This makes the question whether any bundle of rights matches the particular bundle that is called ownership, or true property, in our society even less relevant than it is in a more general study of property rights.⁸

Some modern writers see the right to exclude others as an important characteristic of property,⁹ but this has not been the case in all societies, even those with well-established rules and rights in land. In the European Middle Ages and in colonial America, people with what their societies considered full rights might have to submit to common rights over their land at certain times of the year. Sometimes they had to allow the taking of materials from their land, without compensation, for building roads, fortifications, or other purposes considered to be in the public interest.¹⁰ A landowner’s rights have sometimes also been combined with other individuals’ right to take certain sorts of produce or even to cultivate land that the owner was not using.¹¹ Individuals with recognized rights, whether permanent or temporary, are still often subject to various kinds of incursions in the public interest, like control of watercourses or wayleave (i.e., an easement or, in civil law terms, a servitude) for electricity lines. In all societies the fullest rights in land known to the society are restricted in one way or another. In the past, owners’ rights to hunt or mine in what was recognized as their own property were sometimes restricted, while nowadays planning or zoning controls are often imposed on otherwise full property. Obvious examples of ways in which the rights of property have often been subjected to public needs are the taking of taxes, dues, and services from landowners.

I shall not discuss any of these partial subordinations of individual property to common needs, though including them would mean taking a much more realistic view of the frequently fragmented character of property rights than may be implied by ignoring them. It would, however, make the subject too large and complex for a preliminary foray like this. I am also going to exclude such rights of rulers or other lords, like the right to taxes, as did not deprive landowners of the title to their land. In medieval Europe these might, for instance, include the right to take supplies from land for their courts or armies (fodrum, purveyance or prises); to have lodging for themselves, their courts, or their armies (albergum, gistum, hospitalitas, hospitatio, mansionaticum); or to take over fortresses in time of need (rendition, rendability). Nor am I going to consider the confiscation of land as a penalty or to pay the owner’s debts, or its taking for redistribution in order to secure greater equality (nationalization). This last is easy to leave out since it has happened mostly after my closing date of 1800. I am concerned only with the taking of individual pieces of land, extinguishing all title, rights, or claim the owner or tenant might have, and doing so, not for social justice, nor as a punishment for crime, nor to pay the owner’s debts, but because this piece of land was needed (or was said to be needed) for public use or the common good. My argument will be that in all the periods and in all the societies that I have considered, the right of the community to take land for the common good, with compensation to the owner, seems to have been taken for granted. There is no period in which I have found evidence that it was seen as an innovation.

From now on I shall, for brevity, refer simply to “expropriation” when I mean the taking of land for the common or public good. If I need to mention the taking of land either from individuals as a penalty or to pay debts, or from whole classes of owners for redistribution to others, I shall use the word “confiscation.”

1.2 HISTORIANS AND EXPROPRIATION

Considering the one sort of expropriation I have chosen is difficult enough. First, because, although there may be much that I have not read, secondary works on the subject seem to be surprisingly rare. Historians of politics have a lot to say about taxation and sometimes about penal confiscation or other burdens on property, but little about the possibility of expropriation and its political implications. That may be because it generally affected individuals and often only small pieces of land, so that it did not ignite political controversies at the time. Nevertheless, the acceptance of a rule of expropriation, even with compensation, implies that the needs of a community are assumed to override the rights of its members to their property.¹² It is therefore surprising that historians of political thought concerned with periods in which arguments about property rights or the relation of individuals to society loomed large have not said more about expropriation. Such works as I have found that expressly deal with expropriation, and that I mention in later chapters, on the other hand, do not generally seem to be concerned with the implications of the practice for ideas about society and politics.

Those who analyze property rights in general similarly seem to devote little attention to the ways that apparently secure rights may be lost without any fault of the owner—just as most of them seem to be less interested in the obligations, as opposed to the rights, of property or in societies outside modern Europe and America.¹³ As for lawyers and legal historians, Americans seem to have done more than the British on what they call “takings”¹⁴ of property in England, but they concentrate—reasonably enough—mostly on American law and the problems of compensation.¹⁵ On the Middle Ages, A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Before Eminent Domain
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 Western Europe before 1100
• CHAPTER 3 Western Europe and British North America, 1100–1800
• CHAPTER 4 Justifications and Discussions
• CHAPTER 5 Communities, Individuals, and Property
• Works Cited
• Index