An interdisciplinary study of film, literature, and the law, Professor Stephen Best’s book project, "The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession" explores the connections between two spheres eccentric to the law of real property: slave law and intellectual property law, domains in which an emphasis on fleeting and fugitive properties serves to redefine the very essence of property in nineteenth-century America. Best scrutinizes phenomena such as the emergence of intellectual rights in one’s countenance, vocal style, idea and thoughts, literary expressions and other aspects of personality in order to track the expansion of notions of property to include the abstract and intangible. Professor Best received his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and joined the English Department at Berkeley in 1997.