Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Influence of Politics and Economics on Property Law

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Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Influence of Politics and Economics on Property LawAbstract: Despite substantial change in recent decades, economic disparities between men and women continue to persist today. Contemporary gender inequalities in economic arenas are linked to a legacy of legal inequalities initially enacted in civil property and family law. This project seeks to examine how and why certain family and property laws were adopted, in order to identify the historical processes that have shaped modern gender inequalities. In doing so, the study will provide insight into economic and political inequality in the United States and globally.The legal foundations of modern nation states and economies emerged throughout Western societies in the 18th and 19th centuries, as numerous countries adopted nationally standardized civil law regimes with complex systems of property rights. This project will investigate the cross-national and cross-time variation in civil laws in order to identify the political processes informing which laws were adopted. Further, it will test the degree to which conflicts over economic and political resources drove these legal and political outcomes. Empirically, the project will examine developments in France and more broadly in Europe and will produce two novel datasets. The first subnational dataset will leverage a set of documents containing reform demands, written on the eve of France?s 1789 revolution, to create a geographically comprehensive source of public and elite opinions on legal reform and women?s rights. The second dataset will provide cross-national quantitative indicators of women?s property rights in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The project will provide insight into the factors that drive inequality and hierarchy between men and women in law and economics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.