Montgomery Fellow Joseph Sax last night discussed the extent to which property owners control their land under new interpretations of United States property law.
Provost Lee Bollinger introduced Sax as "the foremost legal and policy theorist of the environment of our time."
Sax delivered a speech in 105 Dartmouth Hall titled, "The Owner as Steward: A Key to the Preservation of Our Heritage," to roughly 100 students, faculty and local residents.
"We are beginning a period of change in property legislation that will have profound implications for preservation of natural habitats as well as objects important to our culture," Sax said.
He said people's views about property began to change 25 years ago when questions regarding issues of environmental preservation arose.
He said people began to ask questions like, "Does the owner of land that contains the last vestiges of a species have a right to destroy this species?"
The idea of the land owner as a steward, who protects and preserves the land because it is in the public's interest, has been the greatest change in property law, Sax said.
"With a few limited exceptions -- human beings, the sea, valuable works of art, [in addition to others] -- our laws permit routine property ownership of anything that can be" tangibly held, Sax said.
Previously, he said, U.S. property law upheld the idea that a property owner could do anything with their property as long as it did not harm others.
"The idea of stewardship is the most significant development in property law this century," Sax said, citing the 1972 Just v. Maryland County court case in Wisconsin, which helped to bring about the "dramatic change."
The case ruled that "an owner of land has no absolute and unlimited right to change the natural character of his land to develop it further," Sax said.
This was a "dramatic change from the way land had been perceived in the past," he said. He said the change broke away from laws like the Homestead Act, which "required land to be put into actual cultivation to gain title."
Sax developed this idea further by dividing property law into two understandings of land.
The first, "land in a transforming economy," sees land as expendable and inert, he said. "The transforming economy builds on the destruction of the nature's economy."
The second view, "the economy of nature," upgrades land to a position of having a function, such as harboring wild animals and maintaining ecosystems, Sax said.
"The owner in this perspective presides over a system that affects the community," he said, "the community has imposed on him the obligation to protect and preserve that object for the community."
Sax compared modern society's interpretation of property laws to Roman and medieval laws, which he said acknowledged that property had value to the community.
Sax said modern-day society is only now emulating the precedents set by these societies by placing such "special" property, which is deemed to have public value, under separate law.
"In a haphazard way, we too have developed some laws to deal with these objects considered important to the community," he said.
Sax is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has written extensively on Western public land and water issues, national parks, the public trust doctrine and other environmental law issues.
He has published many books, including "Legal Control of Water Resources" and "Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks," in addition to a classic textbook on water law.
Created in 1978 by Kenneth Montgomery '25, the Montgomery Fellowship invites prominent people from varied backgrounds to the College to lecture and speak to classes.
