The Geographies of Property Law: Engagement with Place and Space

Abstract

This PhD thesis takes up the topic of property law and the many ways that property is created, changed and redistributed through the law of expropriation. Situated within law and geography scholarship, this thesis adopts methods from geography, particularly physical geography, to interrogate places of expropriation. The law and geography study is of the place where an historic de facto expropriation – erstwhile called constructive expropriation – legal decision takes place. The geographic location is Kingsburg Beach, Nova Scotia; the legal decision is Mariner Real Estate Ltd. v. Nova Scotia (Attorney General), 1999 NSCA 98. Taking a place-based research approach to examine expropriation law and situating that law in a specific location highlights the geographies of property, which, I argue, expropriation law ought to focus on. These geographies are constituted by the past and present, the limits and affordances of the physical geography, and the importance of the type of location, which in the location examined, is a beach-place. First, this thesis constructs a law and geography research methodology and considers how it would apply it to property law broadly. Second, the thesis re-examines the law of expropriation – both de jure and de facto expropriation – through the lens of geography reframing expropriation law as a place-making tool. Third, the thesis examines the case study site from the perspectives of private property, environmental concerns, the publicness of the location, and Aboriginal land interests. Together these individual focal points guide an understanding of place as both complex and specific, and of the law of expropriation as the tool that affords a changing property landscape. Recent developments in the law of expropriation in Canada indicate that expropriation law remains under-examined and in need of critical interrogation. This PhD thesis undertakes such an interrogation and in doing so provides an important reframing of expropriation law, geography and place.