Alien Land Restrictions in the American Common Law: Exploring the Relative Autonomy Paradigm

Arguments Used for Restricting International Real Property Transactions: Case Study of Latvia

“…The authors have performed a more detailed study of the arguments, which are mentioned in scientific publications with regard to restricting land ownership by foreigners. As a result, this research approach has shown that the arguments can be grouped into the following twelve categories: 1) Threat to national security (Vrountas, 1990;Hodgson et al, 1999;Price, 1999;Wood, 2004;Daurova & Esenkulova, 2007;Wilson, 2012;Fairbairn, 2015;Qin, 2015;Gugushvili, 2016). National security or military security is the reason used to restrict acquisition of land by foreigners in the border areas -"restricted zones" 3 .…”

“…This argumentation is largely explained by the fear that land alienation to foreigners can lead to the loss of national sovereignty when the foreigners "control" part of a country's land. 4) Anti-immigration policy (Lazarus, 1987;Hodgson et al, 1999;Price, 1999;Tirres, 2013;Zoomers, 2013;Qin, 2015;Gugushvili, 2016). Restriction of land ownership to immigrants is one of the anti-immigration policy tools.…”

“…It was most often used during some historical periods, for example, in the United States to indirectly reduce immigration from the Far East. This argumentation is more pertinent again in the context of contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric (Price, 1999). 5) National and cultural identity protection (Vrountas, 1990;Hodgson et al, 1999;Wood, 2004;Mycoo, 2005;Karodia & Soni, 2013;Antonelli et al, 2015;Gugushvili, 2016).…”

“…to identify the arguments most frequently used by the scientists in terms of imposing restrictions on foreign real property ownership or use rights. Scientific publications were chosen from the internationally recognised scientific citation databases (Elsevier SCOPUS, Thomson Reuters Web of Science, EBSCO) according to the following parameters: -the results were obtained in a determined area (countries and regions) by studying scientific publications, in which the authors share results of their research; the papers were specifically chosen considering the region of research and whether they address the countries characterised by different economic development levels: from East-Central Europe (Tesser, 2004;Wood, 2004;Burger, 2005;Gugushvili, 2016), __________________________________________________________________________ 2017 / 5 64 worldwide investments from Europe (Antonelli et al, 2015), Africa (Cotula & Vermeulen, 2009;Zoomers, 2013;German et al, 2013;Hailu et al, 2015), Central Asia (Daurova & Esenkulova, 2007), Latin America (Florit & Piedracueva, 2011;Borras et al, 2012;Perrone, 2013;Fairbain, 2015), North America (Bell & Savage, 1980;Lazarus, 1987;Price, 1999;Grant, 2008;Tirres, 2013); -scientific publications covered the following research areas:…”

“…agricultural law (Wilson, 2012), comparative law (Hodgson et al, 1999), economics (Borras et al, 2012;Fuerst, et al, 2015;Karodia & Soni, 2013), foreign direct investments (Vrountas, 1990), geopolitics (Wood, 2004), land use policy (Teklemariam et al, 2015;Mycoo, 2005;Antonelli et al, 2015), law (Tirres, 2004), legal history (Bell & Savage, 1980;Price, 1999;Lazarus, 1987;Tirres, 2013), political science (Qin, 2015), therefore the research can be described as interdisciplinary; -the publications chosen for this research cover a wide spectrum of arguments rather than focus on a single one. 2) International real property transactions and the number of first-time temporary residence permits in Latvia.…”