Conclusions: Towards a Research Agenda for Property Law

At the end of this book there is ample evidence that the law of property is dynamic. The movement is, as suggested in the introduction, both internally and externally motivated. As the world and society is changing, so are legal systems. Property law, even though designed to offer maximum levels of stability and legal certainty, needs to accommodate new problems as well as new viewpoint on what its role in society should be. Conceptualizing a research agenda for the law of property requires common themes to surface from the analysis of its various sub fields. On the basis of such themes the contours of future work become visible. They can never be more than contours as in many subfields it are the specific elements that drive the way forward. In the twenty-first century it is the actual problems surrounding property law that give rise to the study of it. Very large theoretical discussions, such as that between communism and capitalism in the twentieth century make less sense in a complex globalized society. Instead, what all the contributors to this book share is that they are willing to think deeply about what these challenges mean for the way in which they look at their respective sub field. This chapter provides a synthesis of the contributions in the Research Agenda for Property Law book