This is a study of the uses of property in south-western Germany from 1820 to 1914. Based on extensive documentation from civil court records, the book provides important new insights into the nature of civil society, forms of social conflict, and the application of the law to everyday life. The book's intriguing, sometimes bizarre, and always revealing stories of legal disputes offer an ironic and bemused view of the past human condition. - ;Historians have often employed the concept of civil society, an intermediary realm between the family and the state, to analyse nineteenth-century Europe