Publications

My recent work examines how social reformers re-imagine and rework the rules and legal forms that shape our urban landscapes, in their efforts to make cities more equitable, sustainable, and democratic.

Previous work has explored the dilemmas raised by strategies that seek to use law, and human rights litigation in particular, as a tool for political mobilization.

Articles  (* = peer-reviewed)

* Nate Ela. Forthcoming. “Use-Based Welfare: Property Experiments in Chicago, 1895-1935.” Social Science History. (SocArXiv)

Use-based welfare achieves redistribution by reallocating rights to use and benefit from idle resources, rather than via tax and transfer. How and why has this form of welfare provision emerged as an urban institution, and what affects whether it endures? This article compares projects to grant poor and unemployed Chicagoans access to land for gardens and small farms between 1895 and 1935, explaining how this form of social support came about through experiments with rules, norms, and forms of property. While social policy is typically understood as emerging through the realization of rights to public support, use-based welfare turns instead on efforts to create a legal privilege for the needy to use idle resources. During the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, this form of relief was pitched as both an alternative and a complement to welfare based on tax and transfer. Yet efforts to establish it as a permanent institution repeatedly failed, due to implementation challenges, opposition from people committed to treating land and food as commodities, and the non-emergence of a social movement to defend land access. Recognizing the historical dynamics of use-based welfare offers a new perspective on the contemporary resurgence of urban farming as a strategy for addressing unemployment and poverty.

* Nate Ela. 2017. “Litigation Dilemmas: Lessons from the Marcos Human Rights Class Action.” Law & Social Inquiry. 42(2): 479-508. (LSI | SocArXiv)

  • Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award, ASA Sociology of Law Section (2016)
  • Honorable Mention, Best Scholarly Article Award, ASA Section on Human Rights (2017)

How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet sociolegal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.

Nate Ela. 2016. “Urban Commons as Property Experiment: Mapping Chicago’s Farms and Gardens.”Fordham Urban Law Journal 43(2): 247-294. (FULJ | SocArXiv)

Over the past decade, scholars of law and geography have been foraging in America’s cities, hunting for the commons. Along the way, a new common sense has cropped up, which takes urban farms and community gardens as prototypical examples of the urban commons. Farm fields and garden plots produce not only vegetables, the argument goes, but also opportunities for residents to access and use land as a shared, decommodified resource. As both social practice and emergent institutional reality, such urban commons challenge and are challenged by the logics of public and private property that dominate our cities’ legal landscapes.

This Article, rather than assuming that urban farms and gardens are examples of the urban commons, poses this as a question. Are they in fact cases of commons governance? And if so, how do people bring this about? I explore these questions from the ground up, through a socio-legal mapping of how people have gained access to and sought to govern land for a community garden and an urban farm in two neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. This mapping suggests that we should conceive of urban farms and gardens as sites where people experiment with the rules, norms, and forms of property that govern urban land. Municipal policies can promote property experiments that seek to treat urban land as a shared community resource.

Nate Ela, Edo Navot, and Emanuel Ubert. 2012. “Reviewing Walker’s First Year: An Agenda for the One Percent.”Social Policy 42(1):12-19. (scan)

Lauren Coyle, Nate Ela, and Zinaida Miller. 2007. “Introduction: Reveling in Resistance, Imagining Reconstruction.” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left 3:i-v. (Unbound)

Book Chapter

Nate Ela and Greg Rosenberg. 2017. “Land Tenure for Urban Farming: Toward a Scalable Model.” In Community and Regional Food Systems: Identifying Innovations and Promoting Successes, Steve Ventura and Martin Bailkey, eds. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. (MUSE | online at urbanagland.com)

  • Selected to be reprinted in The International Community Land Trust Reader, John E. Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria Hernandez, eds. (2020)

Working Papers

Nate Ela. 2018. “The Promise of Property: Cultivating Legal Optimism and Collective Efficacy in Chicago’s Urban Agriculture District.” (SocArXiv)

Studies of legal cynicism have documented the reluctance of residents in low-income minority neighborhoods to call on criminal law and the police. But are people in such places equally cynical about other forms of law? This article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood have found promise in the opportunities that property law provides for addressing community problems. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines the creation of neighborhood institutions for Chicago’s first urban agriculture district. These institutions have been informed by memories of slavery and sharecropping, and of the role played by food production and economic cooperation in struggles for African American self-determination. To keep ownership, use, and benefits of urban farmland local, organizers in Englewood founded a community land trust. They view this new neighborhood institution as a way to cultivate a sense of community ownership and control, and thereby chip away at the alienation that blocks residents from addressing local problems. Prior studies have linked collective efficacy and residents’ individual sense of ownership; the experience in Englewood points to how collective efficacy could also be fostered by institutions that demonstrate collective, African-American ownership of community resources. The article concludes by discussing why organizers and residents in race-class subjugated communities may find promise in, but also limits to, the sense of sovereignty and legal agency afforded by property.

Nate Ela. 2018. “Reclaiming the Commons” (SocArXiv)

  • A previous version of this paper received an honorable mention from the Social Problems Theory Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2016 graduate student paper award.

Urban agriculture has been theorized by social scientists, and even some urban growers, as a means of reclaiming the commons. But what does “reclaiming the commons” entail? A longue-durée genealogy reveals distinct socio-legal imaginations of the commons and visions of how it might be reclaimed. Social thinkers and reformers have split over how to address the key problem of private property identified by John Locke: landless people who can’t find paid employment. One vision, proposed by Thomas Jefferson, would reclaim the commons by activating space – reuniting the unemployed with unused land. Another, proposed by Thomas Paine, takes such a reunion as impracticable; it would reclaim the commons by taxing property and transferring the proceeds. The genealogical analysis helps understand contemporary urban agriculture as consistent with a Jeffersonian “land fix” mode of reclaiming the commons, and by contrast to state-led “tax fix” strategies for addressing unemployment and poverty.

Reports

Erika Allen and Nate Ela. 2015. “Cultivating Productive Landscapes: A Vision for Urban Agriculture in the Millennium Reserve.” Chicago Food Policy Action Council. (Report | Appendices)

Nate Ela, Satya Rhodes-Conway, and Marion Reitz. 2012. “Assessing Food Systems Sustainability and Resilience.” Report by the Mayors Innovation Project to the City of Portland (OR) Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

“Cultivos Contaminados, Culturas Amenazadas: La Situación de los Transgenicos y Los Derechos Humanos en Pueblos Indígenas de Colombia.” 2009. [Lead author of report submitted by Colombian indigenous and environmental groups to the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Issues.] (online)

  • English translation, “Contaminated Crops, Threatened Cultures: Genetically Modified Organisms and the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia,” submitted as parallel report to the 44th Session of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, May 2010. (CESCR archive)

Popular Media

Nate Ela. “Ya Sabemos que el TLC es Ilegal. Ahora, ¿Qué hacer?” [“We know that the Free Trade Agreement is Illegal. Now, What to Do?”] Revista Semillas no. 40/41, Oct. 2009. (Semillas)

Nathan Ela. “On Salvaging.” Philippine Human Rights Update, vol. 20, no. 2, 2006. (TFDP)