Incumbent residents, tenants as well as homeowners, routinely oppose new housing development. Tenant opposition presents a frustrating puzzle for housing advocates, given robust evidence that new housing supply alleviates rather than causes increases in area rents. In this response to Professor...

Price discrimination generates considerable angst. As merchants develop ever-more-powerful mechanisms for gathering and compiling information about consumers, the specter of fully personalized pricing seems to loom as an ominous threat. Yet a parallel phenomenon quietly coexists with all this...

Resources often produce more value in combination than they do separately: think of segments of a highway or parts of a machine. I argue that property’s defining purpose is to group together complements, and that property law and theory should focus on identifying and realizing valuable...

Categories intentionally create discontinuities. By breaking the world into cognizable chunks, they serve as shortcuts that simplify the information environment. But the signals they provide may be inaccurate or scrambled by strategic behavior. This essay considers how law might approach the...

Projects like highways, bridges, pipelines, and wildlife corridors exhibit indivisibilities — we need the whole thing to have anything of value. Many environmental and social goals have a similar all-or-nothing character: staying above or below a certain critical threshold can make all the...

This essay argues for an approach to resource access that connects rather than separates questions of efficiency and distribution. It proceeds from the premise that putting together the most valuable combinations of resources—including human capital—is of central and increasing normative...

Property rights have long been associated with a simple and distinctive technology: exclusion. But technologies can become outdated as conditions change, and exclusion is no exception. Recent decades have featured profound changes that have made exclusion a less useful, less necessary, and more...

This essay makes the case for “inverting” popular versions of certain theories widely used in legal analysis. Inversion begins with the observation that the assumptions underlying a given theory are substantively false. But rather than reject the theory outright, the theory inverter sees...

Urbanization has dramatically altered the way in which land generates and forfeits value. The dominant economic significance of patterns of land use and the opportunity costs of foregone complementarities have made the capacity to reconfigure urban property essential. Yet the architecture of our...

This paper examines the potential for tailored precommitments to help people address self-control problems. There are practical and normative limits on the degree to which people can bind themselves in ways that they cannot later escape, but law can offer mechanisms that would help people design...