| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good. By Eric T. Freyfogle. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003. 336 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $25.00.

Lawyers, like historians, use the past to account for how things got the way they are. Yet while both disciplines marshal evidence to support arguments, lawyers begin at the end of their story, by making a point and then arranging facts to press their case. Keep this disciplinary distinction in mind when reading Eric T. Freyfogle's The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good, which uses well-chosen illustrations from the American past to argue the proposition that "private property rights are justified and limited by their ability to promote the common good" (p. 229). He denounces as ahistoric the popular political claim that owners have enjoyed, since time immemorial, the unencumbered right to do as they wish, public regulation be damned. Property instead is "a flexible institution," its American (and English) history reflecting "significant changes in what land-owners have been allowed to do" by the community (pp. 99, 7).

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