Douglas Harris

Douglas Harris joined the Allard School of Law in 2001. He teaches and writes in the areas of property law and legal history. His earlier published work focussed on the regulation of Indigenous fisheries in British Columbia, and he is the author of two award-winning books Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (U of T Press) and Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925 (UBC Press). Recorded public lectures include “Property & Sovereignty: The Kitsilano Indian Reserve and the City of Vancouver” and his Inaugural Lecture as professor at the Allard School of Law – “Condominium Property Stories”.
 
After completing his BA (UBC History) and LLB (Toronto), Harris articled in Vancouver and was called to the British Columbia bar in 1994. He returned to school to complete LLM (UBC) and PhD (Osgoode Hall, York University) degrees in legal history. During his years as a university student, Harris was a member of Canada's field hockey team that competed at the Olympic Games in Seoul (1988), the Pan American Games (1987, 1991 & 1995), and the World Student Games (1991). Harris served as Associate Dean Graduate Studies & Research in the Law School, 2008-2013, and as Chair of the UBC Press Publications Board, 2016-2021. He received the George Curtis Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence in 2013 and the Law School’s Faculty Scholar Award in 2016.

Professor Harris is currently working on condominium property, a relatively new form of landownership and local government that has come to dominate new-build residential construction in cities around the world. In collaboration with colleagues at the Allard Law School, he created the Law & Cities Research Group to bring together scholars and students working on the intersection of law and cities. He has developed and teaches courses in Condominium Law and A Legal History of Property & the City. Harris is also a co-author of the leading property law casebook in Canada—A Property Law Reader—now in its 5^th edition. He is currently supervising LLM and PhD students working in property law, Aboriginal law, and legal history, and welcomes other students to apply in these and other areas of his research interest.

Publications are available through the Harris Research Profile on the Allard Research Portal. 

LAW231 Property Law

Property law is concerned with people and things. More specifically, property law is that body of rules and norms that helps to structure relationships between people with respect to things, and perhaps even between people and things. This course introduces the conceptual foundations of property, the basic principles of property law, and the legal regime that regulates land ownership and its transfer in British Columbia. It also provides a foundation for many courses in the upper year curriculum. At the outset, it asks students to consider the nature, sources and justifications of private property. It also introduces the idea of property as an evolving social institution, defined by its social, legal, historical, and even geographical contexts. The course then works through the common law and statutory frameworks that regulate property, with a particular focus on land ownership in British Columbia.

LAW231 Property Law Syllabus 2024 - 25
 

LAW442 Condominium Law

Condominium is rapidly becoming the dominant form of residential land ownership for city dwellers in Canada and much of the rest of the world. In Vancouver, one-third of residents live within condominium, either as owners or renters, and the number of homeowner-households who live within condominium is on track to surpass those within single-family residences. Outside urban centres, condominium is used not only to subdivide ownership within buildings, but also to create separate lots within private residential communities. In short, condominium is becoming the dominant architecture of land ownership, particularly residential land ownership, and understanding what it means to hold a property interest in land in the 21^st century requires an understanding of ownership within condominium. This course provides students with an opportunity to develop an understanding of and to analyze statutory condominium as a legal framework for owning interests in land and governing uses of that land. It focuses on the condominium statute in British Columbia—the Strata Property Act—and on the manner in which it combines private property and co-ownership of common property with a governing body to oversee the uses of the interests in land that it creates.     

LAW442 Condominium Law Syllabus 2025                                                                                               

                                  
LAW313 A Legal History of Property & the City
 

Books

• Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925 (UBC Press, 2008) (winner of the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History in 2011)
• Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (U of T Press, 2001)

Articles

• “Volumetric Subdivision and the Architectures of Property” (2025) 9 Journal of Law, Property and Society 1
• “Tending Gardens, Ploughing Fields, and the Unexamined Drift to Constructive Takings at Common Law” (2023) 61:1 Alta L Rev 89-99
• Douglas C. Harris and Guy Patterson, “Condominium to the Country: The Sprawl of Ownership within Private Local Government in British Columbia” (2023) Law & Social Inquiry
• "Condominium Government and the Right to Live in the City" (2019) 34:3 Canadian Journal of Law & Society 371-392 (PDF full text)
• “Owning and Dissolving Strata Property” (2017) 50:4 UBC Law Review 935-970 (PDF full text)
• “Property and Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve and a Canadian City” (2017) 50:2 UBC Law Review 321 (PDF full text)
• “Anti-Social Behaviour, Expulsion from Condominium, and the Reconstruction of Ownership,” (2016) 54:1 Osgoode Hall Law Journal (PDF full text).
• Douglas C. Harris and May Au, “Title Registration and the Abolition of Notice in British Columbia,” (2014) 47 UBC Law Review. (PDF full text)
• Douglas C. Harris and Karin Mickelson, "Finding Nemo Dat in the Land Title Act: A Comment on Gill v. Bucholt" (2012) 45 UBC Law Review 205-221 (PDF full text).
• "Condominium and the City: The Rise of Property in Vancouver" (2011) 36 Law & Social Inquiry 694-726.

Book Chapters

• “Condominium: A Transformative Innovation in Property and Local Government,” in Nicole Graham, Margaret Davies & Lee Godden, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Property, Law and Society (London: Routledge, 2022) 113-124 (PDF draft text).
• “Embedded Property,” in Lippert & Treffers, eds, Condominium Governance and Law: Global Urban Perspectives (Routledge, 2021) (PDF full text)
• Douglas C. Harris & Nicole Gilewicz, “Dissolving Condominium, Private Takings, and the Nature of Property,” in B. Hoops et al, eds, Rethinking Expropriation Law II: Context, Criteria, and Consequences of Expropriation (The Hague, NL: Eleven, 2015) 263-297 (PDF full text).
• "A Railway, a City and the Public Regulation of Private Property: C.P.R. v. The City of Vancouver" in Tucker, Ziff, and Muir, eds., Canadian Cases in Context (Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and Irwin Law, 2012) 455-486. (PDF full text)

A full list of publications is available through the Harris Research Profile on the Allard Research Portal.