In this paper, I examine three different models of how we manage our common resources through a system of private property rights. One model (the exclusion approach) is to control owners' decisions indirectly, through markets. Another model (the bundle-of-rights approach) is to regulate owners'...

Many modern writers have criticized the notion that property consists of a bundle of rights in some determinate thing as a weak conception that invites increased government control over private property, especially real estate. This article rejects that conception for the following reasons....

The phrase "bundle of rights" does not serve as an accurate conceptual definition of property. Nor has that phrase provided a helpful metaphor as used in Ronald Coase's article "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960) and subsequent legal and economic scholarship. Coase's usage portrays property...

For nearly a century, most persons who have studied or written about property have conceived of it as a bundle of rights or, colloquially, as a bundle of sticks. In the mid 1990s, several philosophically minded academic lawyers questioned whether property should be thought of as a bundle at all....

This essay contrasts the bundle-of-rights picture of property unfavorably with an architectural or modular approach. The bundle is a legacy of Legal Realism and wrongly obscures the costs of delineating property. The bundle treats property as too unstructured, its constituent rights as too...

This essay explores an emerging issue in the criticism of the "bundle" conception of property: whether embracing the right to exclude as the core of property is sufficiently determinate to avoid the same disintegrating effects as the bundle conception. Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith believe so,...

Viewing property rights as a "bundle of sticks" can be descriptively clarifying because the law commonly entitles an owner of a particular resource to split up entitlements in it. Nonetheless, Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith, the most prominent critics of the metaphor, assert that this conception...

This piece is the Prologue to an _Econ Journal Watch_ symposium entitled, _Property: A Bundle of Rights?_ This Prologue was written to prompt the invited scholars to expound their own criticisms of the bundle-of-rights view, or, as the case may be, to address criticisms out there. The Prologue...

The "Bundle of Rights" picture of property purports to explain the facilitative aspect of the powers that go with ownership by treating potential property interests that an owner may _confer_ as pre-existing rights that an owner may _transfer_ to others. This misleads, rather than enlightens,...

The "bundle of rights" metaphor has framed several important questions about property, including questions in constitutional law, conceptual analysis, and institutional understanding. But the bundle metaphor is notably unsuccessful in answering any of these questions. A better metaphor is that...