By Suzi Morales
One writing assignment Associate Professor of Law Meghan Morris gives her first- year property students sets the tone for the class and illustrates Morris’ unique approach to the subject.
Morris asks students to interview a family member or friend about the role property plays in their lives and write a short reflection about their findings. She says students come into the class with certain assumptions about the class or about property generally, including that the subject matter is dry or that property is an exclusive, absolute right.
“Those interviews disrupt a lot of those assumptions, because students realize, number one, it’s super interesting, and their families have been dealing with it their whole lives in ways that they both understood and didn’t understand. Number two, that property actually is never absolute. There are exceptions or instabilities in it in certain contexts,” Morris says. “The assignment disrupts those assumptions, and I think that that’s because the students get a chance to dive into the social world of property that is very close to them.”
A purpose in law
Morris’ own interest in legal rights has an assumption-shifting origin. It began with Ecuadorian chocolate. After graduating from Cornell University, she was accepted to law school but didn’t want to attend without a real sense of her purpose for earning a law degree. Instead, she went to Ecuador and worked with a group of Kichwa communities crafting chocolate and other goods from materials found in the Amazon rainforest. She worked on human rights and environmental issues with the communities, many of which opposed oil development.
With that experience, Morris found her purpose. “That got me really interested in human rights and environmental advocacy work, and I thought, ‘Well, this is something I would really like to do. This is a field I could see myself going into and really caring about, and it’s a reason to go to law school.’”
At the same time as she was earning her JD from Harvard Law School, Morris also was earning a master’s degree in law and diplomacy with a focus on environmental policy from Tufts University. A decade later, she also earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
For Morris, the area of law that brings together her interests in legal rights and social and economic issues is property. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” she says. “I’m really interested in especially how people have conflicts over property and resolve conflicts over property. I’m interested in the social aspects of how people debate property, how people get into arguments about property and figure out solutions to those arguments.”
Property and paramilitarism
Morris is currently working on two books that explore the role of property in conflict. The first considers the Colombian government’s attempt to grant land restitution to people who lost their land in the country’s half-century civil war, as part of an effort to achieve peace with left-wing guerrillas. The book, “Making Peace with Property: Specters of Post-Conflict Colombia,” looks at the role that property plays in both conflict and peacemaking.
Morris began to see parallels between paramilitarism in Colombia and the ways in which armed counter-protests to Black Lives Matter demonstrations played out in the United States in the summer of 2020. Her observations opened up a larger inquiry into the relationship between property and paramilitarism in the U.S., which she addresses in her current book project, “This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream.” She says that relationship “runs deep,” from the role of private posses in the settlement of the West to that of the Ku Klux Klan in segregation.
“You can see the ways that property is used as a justification of violence,” Morris remarks. Her earlier studies of Colombia helped her know the questions to ask in the U.S., although many of the dynamics differ between the two countries.
“That mode of justification of violence with property is something that I see in common now,” Morris says. “[In the U.S.,] it’s framed by very different relationships to gun rights, to federal power, to religion, etc, than what I saw in Colombia. That’s what I think is really interesting. You don’t just have the same kind of relationships cropping up. They’re framed by all these different historical, cultural, social, [and] political contexts.”
Although Morris’ work often delves into violence and inequality, she is optimistic as well. Her optimism comes from those ground-level social relationships that she asks her students to consider each semester. “I think there’s so much focus on national politics – rightly so – but there are all these ways that politics unfolds at different levels,” she says. “Not just state and local government in the strict sense, but also politics as they unfold between neighbors or community members, which is lot of how these conflicts happen. Those are spaces where we have room for movement, where there is room for hope.”