In America, we are eager to claim ownership: our homes, our ideas, our organs, even our own celebrity. But beneath our nation's proprietary longing looms a troublesome question: what does it mean to own something? More simply: what is property? The question is at the heart of many contemporary controversies, including disputes over who owns everything from genetic material to indigenous culture to music and film on the Internet. To decide if and when genes or culture or digits are a kind of property that can be possessed, we must grapple with the nature of property itself. How does it originate? What purposes does it serve? Is it a natural right or one created by law? Accessible and mercifully free of legal jargon, American Property reveals the perpetual challenge of answering these questions, as new forms of property have emerged in response to technological and cultural change, and as ideas about the appropriate scope of government regulation have shifted. This first comprehensive history of property in the United States is a masterly guided tour through a contested human institution that touches all aspects of our lives and desires. Stuart Banner shows that property exists to serve a broad set of purposes, constantly in flux, that render the idea of property itself inconstant. Despite our ideals of ownership, property has always been a means toward other ends. What property signifies and what property is, we come to see, has consistently changed to match the world we want to acquire.

斯图尔特·班纳 著名美国法律史学家，耶鲁大学文学学士，斯坦福大学法律博士（J.D.），现任加州大学洛杉矶分校法学院诺曼·艾布拉姆斯法学教授。班纳曾先后担任第九巡回上诉法院柯辛斯基法官和最高法院奥康纳大法官的助理。现已出版九部专著，内容横跨英美法律史的多个不同领域。在《斯坦福法学评论》《法律与历史评论》《美国法律史期刊》等刊物上发表论文数十篇。