Administrative law

Entry thirty-six is l’espropriazione per pubblica utilità, and a translator who reaches for « expropriation » has written a word British lawyers do not use. The Italian is built on ex and proprium, out of what is one’s own: the state takes the thing away, and the compensation is a separate promise made afterwards. The English term of art names the opposite gesture. It is « compulsory purchase »: the authority buys, the owner sells, and the only thing missing from an ordinary sale is the owner’s consent. Hence « a compulsory purchase order », the document that sets it going, and compensation spoken of as a price rather than as a remedy. « Expropriation » does exist in English, but it has drifted to international law and to accounts of what a foreign government did to somebody’s assets, and it carries a faint charge of wrongdoing the domestic term is careful to avoid. Across the Atlantic the same power is « eminent domain », which names neither the taking nor the buying but the superior title the state is said to have kept all along.