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The Commons as a Legal Concept

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Abstract

Scientific debates about the political, economic and even legal aspects of commons have circulated wherever commons are perceived to pose a challenge to the increasing commodification of people’s lives. Indeed, a wide range of commons has emerged worldwide. Emerging commons pose a challenge to the law which is now requested to provide legal tools to resist the dispossession of the common wealth. Nevertheless, commons do not embody a reality which is external or unfamiliar to the law. This paper is an attempt to reframe the commons as a legal concept. In this article I argue that commons are not just a marginal element of contemporary legal systems. Rather, they embody the premises for important transformative practices and discourses and represent a subversive site in the legal order. I maintain, first, that the law of the commons is consistent with the law in force and the current legal regimes of private property and, second, that the current stage of globalization is most favourable to the establishment of a law of the commons both in the peripheries and at the core of the capitalist system. However, given the persistent dominance of the individual-based property paradigm, the legitimacy of the commons on legal grounds remains problematic. Certainly the recognition and protection of the commons challenge the legal regime of property in force and query about the possible limits that the law may impose upon property rights. It is evident that the true core of the commons discourse as a legal discourse rests upon its relation with property and depends on the notion of property that we assume as normative. The Hohfeldian idea of property as a bundle of rights offers a good starting point for articulating a legal theory of the commons under positive law.

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Notes

  1. Blomley tackles the issue of ‘the property of the poor’, in other words the ways in which poor people in a neighbourhood claim rights on land that has been in the community for decades in reaction to redevelopment projects and gentrification (Blomley 2008, p. 311).

  2. Supreme Court of India, Civil Appeal No. 1132/2011@SLP(C) NO. 3109/2011, 28 January 2011.

  3. Cass. Civ. Sez. Unite. Sent., 14 February 2011, n. 3665.

  4. The locution ‘commons as a legal concept’, which is also the title of this article, takes its inspiration from the famous essay by Frug (1980). However, I have no ambition to play the same seminal role that Frug’s article played in its field, nor do I presume to offer a pivotal or pathbreaking work by analyzing the legal basis of the commons. On the contrary, I am well aware of the huge legal literature existing worldwide on the topic, of which it is literally impossible to provide here an exhaustive review. Setting aside the vast scholarship produced both in North and South America, I limit myself to a few references to the debate on commons and the law in Europe, where there is also quite an extensive scholarship. For the United Kingdom see Linebaugh (2008), Davies (2012, pp. 1–21, 2015), Chatterton (2010, pp. 625–628) and Finchett-Maddock (2010). For France see Parance and de Saint Victor (2014), Dardot and Laval (2014) and Coriat (2015).

  5. For a short introduction see Marella (2014). The Italian literature on the topic is quite vast now. See among many other works Mattei et al. (2007), Mattei (2011), Marella (2012), Ciervo (2012), Rodotà (2013), Lucarelli (2013), Breccia et al. (2015), Sacconi and Ottone (2015) and Quarta and Spanò (2016).

  6. Elinor Ostrom encapsulates this structure in referring to communities of individuals relying on institutions that resemble neither the state nor the market to govern in common some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time (Ostrom 1990, p. 1).

  7. The reference here is to the Italian National Referendum of 12–13 June 2011 over the repeal of a Decree concerning the privatization of public utilities, including tap water.

  8. Tribunale di Roma, VII Sez. Civ., Sent. 8 February 2012 (Agabitini 2012, pp. 850–858).

  9. In this case as well as in others (Ex-Asilo Filangeri, Teatro Valle, Ex-Colorificio Toscano, etc.) it is possible to talk of a ‘virtuous occupation’, because this kind of occupation activates a virtuous circle of utilities production by ‘freeing’ real estates and areas from owners’ misuse whilst, at the same time, using them ‘properly’, for instance, by organizing Italian language courses for migrants, free sport activities, cultural happenings, afterschool activities, free-access libraries, etc.

  10. For further developments in the relation between social movements and the Rodotà Commission see Marella (2014).

  11. It is actually in the agenda of the Commissione Giustizia in the Italian Senate, which is awaiting examination.

  12. The draft and the introductory memorandum are available at the web site http://www.giustizia.it/giustizia/it/mg_1_12_1.wp?contentId=SPS47617.

  13. Corte di Cassazione, Sezioni Unite Civili, 14 February 2011, n. 3665.

  14. See the report of the World Health Organization published in 2008, in http://www.who.int/whr/2008/en/.

  15. A good practice of commoning within law faculties are legal clinics, a bottom-up teaching methodology in which students learn by problem-solving and engaging with real clients (usually socially marginalized people excluded from access to justice). By doing so, a non-hierarchical process of legal knowledge production is implemented and more importantly this legal knowledge is shared with a broader community outside the law faculty (Marella and Rigo 2015, pp. 181–194).

  16. A good example of an idea of infrastructures as commons is offered by basic research. Like a road system or communication networks or oceans, basic research facilitates downstream creation of further knowledge and research. It is a non-rival resource: it creates downstream benefits and is characterized by a wide variety of downstream uses. But it is doomed to impoverishment through patenting and enclosures of various kinds—such as objectives selection in accordance to market demand.

  17. But see Art. 542 (regulating ‘les biens communaux’) and Art. 714 (on ‘les choses communes’).

  18. Of fundamental importance, from a genealogical point of view, is Yan Thomas’ well-known essay La valeur des chose (2002), in which he argues that the very existence of individual property in Roman law, which the dominant view has traditionally represented as the noble ancestry of modern private property, derives ‘by subtraction’ from the legal regimes of common and public goods, so that individual property itself was even unconceivable without taking into account the regulation of non-private goods.

  19. According to Nicholas Blomley the right to exclude is the basis of private property, whereas ‘common property can be understood as the right to not be excluded from the use of a thing’ (Blomley 2008, pp. 311, 319 f). In the text I assume that commons do not correspond to a third species of the genus property, other than private property and state property, for its core ‘sticks’ are rather access and use, independently from ownership. For this reason I prefer not to use the definition of common property as it may entail the kind of ambiguity that I want to avoid. This leads me to specify the structure of my continuum scheme to clarify the distance between the way in which commons are conceptualized in this paper and collective property notwithstanding the fact that in current non genealogical analyses the latter is commonly assumed as ‘the origin’ of the former.

  20. Blomley, drawing from Singer (1988).

  21. Cass. Roma, 9 March 1887. The Municipality’s success was also due to the legal arguments of the plaintiff’s attorney, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, a distinguished legal scholar whose appeal brief was later published with the title Del diritto di uso pubblico del Comune e del Popolo di Roma sulla Villa Borghese, 1886 (Di Porto 2013, pp. 45–73).

  22. See Cass., sez. II, 23.05.2012, n. 8165. In reference to the nature of the collective right of use on a privately-owned land as an entitlement granted by Art. 825 of the Civil Code to single individuals—not uti singuli but—uti cives, see Cass., sez. II, 22 October 2013, n. 23960; Cass., sez. II, 22 March 2012, n. 4597.

  23. With reference to the Italian experience Justice Paolo Grossi has talked of a ‘holocaust’ (Grossi 1977, pp. 10–11).

  24. Emblematic are also patents registered by indigenous people, such as Maori on aspects of their traditional culture (Vezzani 2012, 2007, pp. 305–342).

  25. An important case concerning patents on human genes is Association for Molecular Pathology v. United States Patent and Trademark Office. In May 2009 the Association for Molecular Pathology and other medical associations, doctors and patients sued the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Myriad Genetics, over patents related to two breast cancer genes and certain diagnostic screening methods. According to the plaintiff the patents in question violated §101 of the Patent Act, 35 USC. The US District Court for the Southern District of New York declared that isolating DNA was not patentable because it was not ‘markedly different’ from native DNA as it existed in nature, and that the claims for ‘analyzing’ and ‘comparing’ DNA sequences were invalid because they simply regarded abstract mental processes. In the appeal judgment (29 July 2011), the Federal Circuit held that isolated DNA sequences could not be considered the product of nature because they were chemically distinct from their native state; moreover the screening method for cancer therapeutics included transformative steps and presented ‘functional and palpable applications in the field of biotechnology’. Instead the Court confirmed the claim that comparing and analyzing DNA sequences were patent-ineligible. In March 2012 the US Supreme Court issued a first writ of certiorari. It vacated the Federal Circuit judgment and remanded the case back to the Federal Circuit to reconsider it in light of the recent decision in Mayo Collective Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. The Federal Circuit confirmed its previous position about the patentability of isolated human genes. The Association for Molecular Pathology petitioned for another writ of certiorari, which was granted, but limited to the patentability of human genes. On 13 June 2013 the US Supreme Court stated that a DNA segment was a product of nature and so was not patent eligible, even if it had been isolated, while Complementary DNA might be patent eligible because it was not naturally occurring.

  26. It is possible to read the ‘Declaration’ at http://www.euronomade.info/?p=6456.

  27. Problems arise when we consider occupations that are protected by means of possession claims: a potential conflict between free access granted to all and the legal protection of possession is clearly evident here.

  28. As to the Treaty between the Maori community and the New Zealand Government see Ruruku Whakatupua Te Mana o te Awa Tupua, available online at: http://nz01.terabyte.co.nz/ots/DocumentLibrary/RurukuWhakatupua-TeManaoTeAwaTupua.pdf.

  29. By guaranteeing free access to urban sites, occupants not only practice a bottom-up production of welfare, but also try to reinvent labour beyond labour/capital relations. This allows for alternative means of income through ‘commoning’.

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Acknowledgements

Professor of Private Law, University of Perugia, Department of Law. I wish to thank Costas Douzinas for encouraging me to write this article and Paolo Napoli for the several discussions on this topic at the EHESS-CENJ, Paris. For excellent editorial and research assistance my thanks to Elisa Contu.

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  1. Dipartimento di giurisprudenza, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Via A. Pascoli, 33, 06123, Perugia, PG, Italy

    Maria Rosaria Marella

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Marella, M.R. The Commons as a Legal Concept. Law Critique 28, 61–86 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9193-0

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