How do we make it more beautiful?
Land tenure and the legacy of care
Our legal overculture is deficient in all things beautiful that reaffirm human and planetary connection. Like many professions, the law suffers from a bad case of remarkable arrogance, hyper-capitalism and artificial objectivity.
The clinic was born to caretake the land in ways that conventional property law cannot. Property law can be distilled down to a loose regulatory framework with the intent of the parties as the real driving force behind the transaction. How land is conveyed, bargained for, used, leased, warranted, inherited, taxed or otherwise encumbered is largely dependent on the how the property holder views their role as the land’s caretaker. Unfortunately, those that have access to stable land ownership have often seen the land as a vehicle for wealth accumulation rather than acknowledging their role as an integral part of the parcel’s ecosystem.
The clinic is interested in supporting those that want to push back on land as commodity. The wonder of the “free market” approach to land is that there is an incredible amount of flexibility in how land-based transactions are structured. Through our work, we examine and imagine how we can use the inherent fluidity of property law to redirect currents towards a more symbiotic relationship with the land beneath our feet. We do so through through a transdisciplinary lens - looking to art, ecology, the human nervous system, design, TEK, and other methodologies that do not adopt the same ethnocentric, capitalistic and tunnel-vision principles of the legal system to evolutionize what is "legally" possible.
On our substack, we’ll share our learnings along the way, demystify legal terms and misconceptions, share out art, celebrate our clients, dance to music and have guest writers contribute. We honestly don’t know what it will look like but have great hopes that whatever transpires makes everything a bit more beautiful.