Property and Community

Gregory Alexander, a nationally renowned expert in property law, has taught at Cornell Law School since 1985. Alexander has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, in Palo Alto, California and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative and International Law, in Hamburg and Heidelberg, Germany. Mr. Alexander is a prolific and recognized writer, the winner of the American Publishers Association's 1997 Best Book of the Year in Law award for his work, Commodity and Propriety. His most recent book is The Global Debate Over Constitutional Property: Lessons for American Takings Jurisprudence.

Eduardo Peñalver joined the Cornell faculty in 2006 after teaching from 2003-05 at Fordham Law School and spending 2005-06 as a visiting professor at Yale Law School. Professor Peñalver received his B.A. from Cornell University and his law degree from Yale Law School. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. His research interests focus on property and land use, as well as law and religion. He is particularly interested in the ways property both fosters and reflects communal bonds.

Gregory Alexander, a nationally renowned expert in property law, has taught at Cornell Law School since 1985. Alexander has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, in Palo Alto, California and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative and International Law, in Hamburg and Heidelberg, Germany. Mr. Alexander is a prolific and recognized writer, the winner of the American Publishers Association's 1997 Best Book of the Year in Law award for his work, Commodity and Propriety. His most recent book is The Global Debate Over Constitutional Property: Lessons for American Takings Jurisprudence.

Hanoch Dagan is the Dean of the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies at TAU. He is also a member of the American Law Institute and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. Professor Dagan wrote Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values and The Law and Ethics of Restitution (both with Cambridge University Press) as well as numerous articles on property, restitution, and private law theory. His articles were published in leading legal journals such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, California Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and University of Toronto Law Journal. His forthcoming book - Property, State, and Community - will be published with Oxford University Press in 2011.

Kevin Gray was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999. He has been a Professor of Law in the University of Cambridge since 1993 and is Dean of Trinity College Cambridge. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the National University of Singapore. He was formerly Drapers Professor of Law in the University of London and a Senior Research Fellow in the University of Oxford. He has held visiting fellowships and professorships at the Australian National University (on numerous occasions) and at the Universities of Leiden, New South Wales, Osaka, Stellenbosch, Tasmania and Tilburg. He has written extensively on property law and theory, family law, human rights and the environment, and is a co-author of Gray and Gray, Elements of Land Law. In 2008 he was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.

David Lametti is the Associate Dean (Academic) and Associate Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University. He is a past Director of the Institute of Comparative Law and a founding Member of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (CIPP). He teaches and writes in the areas of Civil and Common law property, intellectual property and property theory. His work to date has attempted to understand the parameters or traditional and intellectual resources in analytic terms, linking them to their underlying justifications and ethical goals. He obtained a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Toronto in 1985, and received his Common and Civil law degrees from McGill in 1989. He received an LL.M. from the Yale Law School in 1991, and a Doctorate in Law from Oxford University in 1999. He was a clerk to Justice Peter Cory of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1989-90.

Avital Margalit is a graduate of Tel Aviv University in Law (LL.B) and in Sociology and Psychology (B.A), and a graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley (LL.M, J.S.D). She teaches courses on property law and the sociology of law at the Law Faculty of Bar Ilan University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural aspects of property relationships, co-operative societies and the legal history of the Kibbutz.

Eduardo Peñalver joined the Cornell faculty in 2006 after teaching from 2003-05 at Fordham Law School and spending 2005-06 as a visiting professor at Yale Law School. Professor Peñalver received his B.A. from Cornell University and his law degree from Yale Law School. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. His research interests focus on property and land use, as well as law and religion. He is particularly interested in the ways property both fosters and reflects communal bonds.

Joseph William Singer began teaching at Boston University School of Law in 1984 and has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1992. He was appointed Bussey Professor of Law in 2006. Singer received a B.A. from Williams College in 1976, an A.M. in political science from Harvard in 1978, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1981. He clerked for Justice Morris Pashman on the Supreme Court of New Jersey from 1981 to 1982 and was an associate at the law firm of Palmer & Dodge in Boston, focusing on municipal law, from 1982 to 1984. He teaches and writes about property law, conflict of laws, and federal Indian law, and has published more than 40 law review articles. He was one of the executive editors of the 2005 edition of Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law. He has written a casebook and a treatise on property law, as well as two theoretical books on property called Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property and The Edges of the Field: Lessons on the Obligations of Ownership.

Nomi M. Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law at the University of Southern California Law School, where she has taught courses on Property Law, Family Law, Law and Religion, and Law, Language and Ethics. A strong proponent of multidisciplinary research and teaching, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History and Culture. She is a member of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, and serves on the editorial boards of Theory and Research in Education and the Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, cultural pluralism, law and liberalism, and law and literature. She has published a number of works on property and community, including "The Property of Culture" (Daedalus 2000), "A Tale of Two Villages" (NOMOS XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights, Shapiro & Kymlicka, eds., N.Y.U. Press), "The Puzzling Persistence of Community" (in FROM GHETTO TO EMANCIPATION, University of Scranton Press, Myers & Rowe, eds.), and "The Return of the Repressed: Illiberal Groups in a Liberal State" (Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues) and on law and religion ("The Profanity of Law" in LAW AND THE SACRED, Sarat, Douglas and Umphrey, eds., Stanford U. Press, and "He Drew A Circle That Shut Me Out," Harvard Law Review). She is currently working on a book on the interaction between the American liberal legal regime and traditional Jewish law and culture in the ultra-Orthdox Satmar community of Kiryas Joel.

A J van der Walt graduated from Potchefstroom University in 1985 with a thesis on ownership, possession and holdership. He completed an LLM degree in Property Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1986 with a dissertation on the conservation of the built-up environment. He has taught Property Law, Legal Philosophy and Legal History at Potchefstroom University, the University of South Africa and Stellenbosch University. Since 2008 he holds the South African Research Chair in Property Law at Stellenbosch University. He has been the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship on several occasions and has been a visiting fellow commoner in Trinity College, Cambridge. Professor Van der Walt is author, co-author or editor of and contributor to more than 20 books on legal history, research methodology and property law, and has published more than 100 articles in legal journals. He has presented more than 50 papers at international conferences or as guest lecturer. He was co-organiser of the international colloquium on property law presented by the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands in September 1995 and co-editor of the collected papers of the colloquium. His most recent work is mainly concerned with constitutional property, land reform and property theory. His most recent books include Constitutional Property Clauses: A Comparative Analysis (1999); Constitutional Property Law (2005) and Property in the Margins (2009).