Simplification is Complicated: Property, Nature, and the Rivers of Law

Abstract

A number of scholars have criticized the ways in which property law simplifies nature. Such reductive simplifications are seen as being reliant upon a claim to mastery and dominion that is belied by the essential complexity and dynamism of the natural world. Drawing from a close reading of a property-boundary dispute involving the historical movements of the Missouri River, I supplement this account by revealing the ways in which legal simplication is itself complicated: that is, both dependent on considerable amounts of practical work, and subject to breakdown, ambiguity, and contradiction. Rather than a singular river, made legible through the unfolding of a unitary legal logic, I reveal several conflicting ‘rivers’ produced through property law. I conclude by trying to make sense of property as a set of practices that serve to produce the ‘effect’ of property. These practices, while often messy and contradictory, are, nevertheless, significant in the installation of property as a powerful organizing device through which the social world is made meaningful.