ABSTRACT
The study of property in Latin America came out of the traditional law school room toward the social laboratory of socio-legal scholars a long time ago with the impulse to understand and explain how property rights and relations work in society. This chapter presents a review of the socio-legal literature on property in the region and organizes the discussions in four areas: (1) the debates about the relation between property and development; (2) the binary of formality versus informality of property rights; (3) legal pluralism on property rights; and (4) the liminality of property in a globalized age. This structure aims to show that an initial common interest on law in action around property has evolved into different subfields creating a fragmented landscape of property issues. The chapter includes a fifth area in which the study and defense of territorial rights of ethnic groups in Latin America is starting to use a property theory framework to advance claims of autonomy. As the chapter shows the fragmentation and divides in the discussions about property in society, it identifies research lines that may be instrumental to integrate some of the debates of the literature for understanding what the author calls configurations of property, and advocates for an integrated socio-legal understanding of property rights and their constitutive role in social relations.
