Chapter 5 explains what tenure legally entails in order to temper the claim that tenure is exceptional in the landscape of employment contracts. It argues that tenure is merely a variation on the “just cause” contracts applied to many workers and that the protections of just cause are necessitated by a uniquely American default rule, namely, that most employment relationships are terminable “at-will.”

Chapter 1 situates the book within recent battles over higher education and scholarship on academia, and provides an introduction to the volume.

Chapter 6 tells the pre-history of tenure beginning with the colonial era and proceeding until the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, which is widely credited with defining what faculty tenure means in the United States. The chapter shows that many key legal elements of tenure have existed since the seventeenth century, and that employment concerns like job security played a much larger role in shaping academic employment than is commonly acknowledged.

Chapter 2 introduces the author as an anthropologist, an employment law scholar, and the child of two professors. It explains how this background informs the method and scope of the book and why it, along with qualitative and quantitative research, provides insight into a range of academic experiences.

Chapter 13 addresses a second myth regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure facilitates predatory behavior. The chapter focuses on sexual misconduct and draws on available research regarding its prevalence inside and outside academia – as well as inside and outside the United States – to show that severe power disparities, rather than tenure itself, are most likely responsible for high misconduct rates in academia.

Of the two parallel lives, it is Hannibal who used an elected position to carry through political and economic reforms unwelcome to the ruling oligarchy, whereas Scipio was quiet and accepting of the status quo. A story that Hannibal was prosecuted after Zama is not believable. He urged acceptance of the peace terms after Zama, manhandling an opposing speaker; he apologized for this, pleading long absence from civil life. As elected ‘praetor’ (sufete), he antagonized powerful citizens. His summons of a ‘quaestor’ (financial official) was refused. Scipio, soon after, also had trouble with a recalcitrant quaestor. Hannibal’s main political reform was to end life tenure of the ‘judges’. Economically, perhaps using skills developed when managing the logistics of his Italian campaign, he calculated Carthage’s revenues and ended embezzlement. The unpopularity with the ruling class so generated, and Roman diplomatic pressure, caused him to flee permanently. Carthage’s second-century economy is evaluated.

This chapter centres upon what might be referred to as the foundation concepts of land ownership. It examines the doctrine of land tenure as relevant in modern Australia but locates the discussion within its historical context. We then investigate the doctrine of estates and see how this doctrine is inextricably linked to the doctrine of land tenure in providing time-based recognition of interests in land. The discussion then moves to a consideration of legal future interests and how the common law has been modified by legislation. The chapter next considers the restraint on alienation of property and the rule against perpetuities. The focus of this part of the chapter is concerned with understanding how the law governs a property owner’s ability to control the alienation of their property. The starting point is the general principle of the free alienation of property. As the modern rule against perpetuities is a combination of concepts developed by the common law and as now adjusted by legislative reform, you will need to appreciate the interconnection between common law concepts and critical provisions of the reforming legislation across Australian jurisdictions.

This chapter addresses the history of chinampas, agriculture, and the rise of rural estates known as haciendas. It examines the construction, cultivation, and distribution of chinampas as well as the dispersed pattern of landholdings and the complexities of land tenure. The chapter observes the conspicuous absence of Spaniards and other non-Native peoples as the owners of chinampas. The chinampas became a source of contestation within the indigenous community, though, since claims of the communal, usufruct rights to chinampas rubbed up against efforts by the nobility to shore up their holdings through private ownership. In the sixteenth century, demographic decline and the competing demands of the colonial government, anxious about provisioning Mexico City during periods of food insecurity, forced a restructuring of land tenure classifications. At the same time, Spaniards received grants to establish ranches away in the nearby hills where they and Nahuas introduced livestock. As a consequence of all this, a distinctive historical geography came into being, with chinampas and intensive, small-scale horticulture in the lakes, and extensive pastoralism in the upland areas.

The first task in explaining parliamentary emergence is accounting for the regularity of the institution. The chapter advances a theory of functional fusion and institutional layering to explain why England developed a robust parliament, while France, which began with a very similar institution, did not. It begins by discussing some key necessary conditions, that of state power and related concepts, and by specifying the dependent variable, polity-wide representative institutions. The chapter then examines alternative explanations to show how they don't satisfactorily answer the three main questions regarding origins (regularity, the collective action problem, and territorial anchoring). The last part addresses the problem of regularity. It first presents data showing that taxation was too irregular to generate a robust institution and then presents the incentives that led especially more powerful groups, namely the nobility, to attend the institution regularly. Parliament dispensed legislation and justice and was the main forum for the submission of petitions, the universal medium of grievance that was at the core of parliamentary procedures.

A global trend towards more community control over forests has slowed deforestation and forest degradation, reduced carbon emissions, supported community livelihoods and built social capital. In some cases these positive benefits have not been realized, and there have been mixed results on intra-community equity. Three ‘wicked characteristics’ mitigate the success of community forests: where tenure change erodes the power of economic and technical elites, who then respond by undermining the community forest; where it is difficult to support communities without impacting their collective action; and where governments develop policies that are difficult to adapt to local contexts.

Chapter seven examines the impact of liberalization on the Egyptian countryside. Touted as a solution to Egypt’s agricultural productivity problems, the liberalization of agriculture resulted in an extended process of dispossession in the countryside and a redistribution of land to the elite and to multi-national investors. The abolition of tenure security for peasants and small farmers, forced evictions and skyrocketing rents brought immiseration to the small producers of rural Egypt and further increased Egypt’s deep dependence on food imports. Dispossession also resulted in the intensification of land-related violence, particularly after the introduction of the agrarian reforms of 1997. While the intensification of class conflict in the countryside did not have the same dramatic effect on Egyptian politics as did the growing strike waves in the industrial cities, it did contribute to the breakdown of traditional relations of authority and the erosion of rural support for the Mubarak regime.

Domesday Book was linguistically speaking an Anglo-Norman record using Latinized versions of French, not English, terms. This chapter asks: did Norman Latin bring into England some Norman ideas about land and people? There was no Old English equivalent for manerium : ‘manor’ was a word which the Domesday enquiry itself made necessary. Domesday Book’s terms for the mass of people, such as villani , are also imports and reflect Norman views of peasants. Key terms in Domesday entries are those connected with holding land from another person: the debate about how we might interpret these is briefly visited before concluding that tenure itself was a Norman idea imported in Norman heads.

Holding land ‘in fee’ was an idea central to the Normans. A fee was land which was part of a relationship to which tenure was central. Land in ‘fee simple’ was ‘land held hereditarily, by service’. This chapter looks at how these feudal ideas played out in the English countryside. After the Conquest a link was being established between tenure and doing ‘homage’ for land. and there is an ongoing debate over whether this was expressed in the Oath of Salisbury, and whether there was a connection between the Oath and the Domesday survey. The second part of the chapter is an enquiry into the means by which peasant tenures too became ‘feudalised’. Courts, and what a court consisted of, were changing. Before the Conquest the hundred and the shire, were the proper forum in which to settle disputes but for Norman lords taking over English lands jurisdiction over one’s ‘men’ was a valuable part of what lordship entailed. The procedures and vocabulary of hallmoots and manor courts show that, while incorporating the ideas inherent in feudal tenure, they retained something of the early notions of dispute settlement.