King's College London

In Property and Justice: A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights, Dr Christmas considers the economic, ecological, and technological complexities of real-world property systems, looking closely at the full spectrum of property rights and their relationship to a deontic account of individual liberty.

Across seven chapters, the book, published by Routledge, covers everything from private property, common property, intellectual property, and property in one’s own body. It draws on the traditions found in the works of Hugo Grotius, John Locke and Immanuel Kant, as well as a wide variety of modern scholars as diverse as Hillel Steiner, Elinor Ostrom, and James Penner.

Dr Christmas, a lecturer in political theory in the Department of Political Economy, said: “I owe a lot of gratitude to all the people and organisations that helped the development of this work. My hope is that in showing the practicality and normative plausibility of a property system guided by individual liberty, that classical deontic accounts of liberalism can be taken more seriously again.”