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.

斯圖爾特·班納 著名美國法律史學傢，耶魯大學文學學士，斯坦福大學法律博士（J.D.），現任加州大學洛杉磯分校法學院諾曼·艾布拉姆斯法學教授。班納曾先後擔任第九巡迴上訴法院柯辛斯基法官和最高法院奧康納大法官的助理。現已齣版九部專著，內容橫跨英美法律史的多個不同領域。在《斯坦福法學評論》《法律與曆史評論》《美國法律史期刊》等刊物上發錶論文數十篇。