The Maine lobster fishery is a successful example of a managed natural resource commons. To ensure an ongoing supply of lobsters in the face of threats to the fishery from unregulated over-fishing, over a period of years Maine lobster fishermen crafted a set of formal and informal rules to determine… Read More »
Place matters. No matter one’s income, and no matter one’s status as a renter or homeowner, the communities where we spend our lives strongly affect our daily enjoyment of life. The appearance of these communities is a strong component of this satisfaction. Concerns about the physical appearance of neighborhoods and… Read More »
The dominant theoretical frame for conceptualizing uses of copyrighted works is the First Amendment’s protection for free speech. Despite numerous calls for greater First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, there has been an almost unrelenting rejection of independent First Amendment review in copyright cases. Even when free speech values are… Read More »
By writing a series of James Bond novels, Ian Fleming qualified for American copyright protection, pursuant to which works created by others without license and found by courts to be substantially similar to the novels would generally infringe his copyright. Imagine instead that Fleming would have had to draft a… Read More »
Existing uses occupy a special place in property and land use law. A use, once established, is imbued with an expectation that it may continue to exist, even in the face of regulatory change. For example, once built, a building becomes all but immune from subsequently enacted zoning rules. As… Read More »
By allowing the condemnation of private homes to make way for a “more attractive” private development, the U.S. Supreme Court in Kelo v. City of New London roused the fury of the libertarian legal academy and much of the public. In Kelo, the Court held that a plan for private economic… Read More »
Our preferences vary in intensity. Some are relatively strong, while others are comparatively weak. Information regarding the strength—rather than just the content—of preferences is often essential, for both efficiency and fairness reasons. The goal of efficiency maximization requires the allocation of goods to those who value them most. Accordingly, when… Read More »
My Article, Land Values, has two goals. First, it explores the descriptive and normative limitations of certain “law and economics” discussions of the ownership and use of land. Law and economics provides, among other things, “a theory of the purposive behavior of private landowners” to employ in assessing legal structures… Read More »
Much recent property theory, both in the United States and elsewhere, is devoted to a search for the essential core of ownership. So, Tom Merrill and James Penner have argued that the right to exclude is the sine qua non of ownership. Henry Smith has similarly argued that the right… Read More »
Abraham Bell’s instructive article begins with his conscious decision to distance himself from the “popular firestorm” that greeted the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v New London. In so doing, however, he reveals a tin ear to the public protests, which contain much good sense. As one author who has… Read More »