Colin Hulme, head of intellectual property (IP) at Burness Paull, considers the impact of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) programmes on the observance of copyright by corporates. This article was commissioned by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and first appeared in the New Law Journal in 2023.

As a faculty member with a teaching load of four classes per semester at a public university, my approach to reading from Dust They Came by Jonathan H. Ebel and Sowing the Sacred by Lloyd Daniel Barba is born of the necessity of trying to streamline my workload as a teacher-scholar and bring new material to my students. My institution frequently ranks highly on lists that measure social mobility, largely because the students we admit are often among the least affluent in the state. It also ranks highly for diversity, as a Hispanic Serving Institute, and as the state university that leads the way in graduating Black students. But these students are also thoroughly urban, often with little travel experience beyond the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Histories of the state’s agricultural regions, places they often imagine as barren land, are a harder sell. Our majors, however, are curious both about the lives of people that have not been well-documented and about the world outside of our geographic region, and these books as a pair, can satisfy that curiosity if I can present related themes that resonate with the students. I have found that looking at the institutions in these works (the government camp and the church) as ones meant to serve as examples of an idealized way of American life, thinking about the way such institutions often regulate the poor, and looking at how geography impacts experience are all key components of these works that might be interesting to students.

The ‘commons’ has acquired a renewed theoretical currency in recent years as a way of conceptualizing how different beings live together in shared places that are shaped and modified by human and non-human actions and structures. Through socioecological changes, warfare, movements of populations, sacralizations of land, political territorializations, and man-made infrastructures, the topography of any region, as a commons, is a process of perpetual transformation, invested by different flows and communities of humans. In this article, we will consider the positioning of the Lanten Yao (Mun) ethnic group within the Luang Namtha region in northern Laos. In the twentieth century, the Lanten Yao lived through the transformation of the commons into the territorialization and infrastructural building of colonial empires and nation-states, and negotiated the routes and boundaries between Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. Today, the land is once again being transformed through the Belt and Road Initiative, with the construction of Special Economic Zones, two ‘smart cities’, a high-speed railway, and a new speedway only a short distance from the Lanten villages. These new infrastructures are once again leading the Lanten to transform their relationships to their land, other peoples close and far, and distant states and administrations. In this article, we will explore how these shifting relationships to the commons are expressed in the rituals, sacred memories, and changing religious configurations among the Lanten Yao.