Many modern-day Americans think about legal rights in a dualistic fashion. "Personal rights" fall on one side of the divide, while "property rights" fall on the other, and these categories of rights often are deemed to be separate and distinct. This essay, which introduces a symposium on...

From public lands to beaches and to data, our society is rich with resources purposefully kept in the public domain. Common resources provide profound economic, social, and democratic value to individuals, communities, and society as a whole. These, however, depend on the public’s ability to...

In their seminal 1972 article, "Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral," Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed proposed an analytic framework for comparing entitlements protected by property rules and liability rules. Their article has become one of the...

Most U.S. states passed married women's property and earnings acts between 1850 and 1920. These acts gave married women the right to own and control their separate property, and to own their market earnings. We examine the acts' effects on investment by families in girls' human capital. Standard...

In this article, the question is raised why upon the introduction of same sex marriage no one has raised the issue whether one should take for granted the automatic application of the legal marital property law that was made for heterosexual couples. The argument goes that in the heat of the...

The main thesis of this article is that individuals should own their user-held data. Rapidly developing data processing technologies empowers individuals to collect their data from different sources and retain it in personal data clouds. Such user-held data represents the most accurate,...

This Chapter studies how tort presumes and implements theories of rights. Although most recent philosophical scholarship on tort has focused on corrective justice, by and large that scholarship takes for granted that tort corrects wrongs to substantive moral rights. The morality that generates...

This article examines the use of the term “possessory title” to denominate the interest that is acquired by a person, B, when (and because) B takes possession of another person’s (A’s) tangible chattel. It contends that, depending on the exact meaning ascribed to the term “possessory...

This Article considers the role of property rights in efforts to sequester underground hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year from power plants and other industrial facilities in order to mitigate climate change. This technology, known as carbon capture and sequestration...

This Article utilizes the case of two sugar cane investments in Cambodia to reflect on the interactions between the multi-territoriality of supply chain capitalism and the multiplication of local spaces of intervention. With a combination of legal institutionalism, critical geography and...