The commons: Legal rights and institutions to protect our common wealth

초록

All societies have common wealth, whether endowed by nature or socially constructed. Effective management and preservation of common wealth is a necessary condition for the prosperity and sustainability of a given society. Common wealth, however, disappears under privatization in the absence of laws, particularly concerning complexity of property relations, that expressly protect everyone’s claim to common wealth. Neither the capitalist mode of production nor the individualist lifestyle is conducive to the creation of new common wealth. The commons are created and maintained through commoning, which is itself essential to the protection, production, and preservation of the commons, so that laws ought to support and encourage it. The bill for the Act on the Protection and Development of Local Business Communities, expressly opposing gentrification and protecting the survival and interests of all stakeholders of local communities (including renters, tenants, and business owners), is a noteworthy example of such a law. Courts ought also to recognize the social value of commoning and provide juridical protection for it. A good example is the court’s decision that favored the request for enjoining of infringement upon returns that had accrued on a downtown landscape formed and maintained by the local community’s commoning, highlighting that such returns belong to the common wealth of society. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society; individual chapters, the contributors.