A bridge that only spans three-quarters of the distance across a chasm is useless, although far from costless. This standard, intuitive example of a lumpy or step good illustrates a point about discontinuities and complementarities that has broad, and mostly unexplored, significance for property...

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...

There is a blind spot in the scholarly and legal treatment of housing discrimination: the racial biases of home seekers. Search strategies routinely incorporate information about neighborhood racial composition, either as a proxy or as a direct preference. Although search heuristics can...

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 But technologies can become outdated as conditions change, and exclusion is no exception.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...

Tort law deals in lumps. It responds not to the innumerable fine-grained acts of risk creation that each of us performs every day but rather to large, discrete, harmful events — “accidents.” And it responds to those events in a binary way, converting unruly facts into an on/off judgment...

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...

Welfarist law and economics ignores the distributive consequences of legal rules to focus solely on efficiency, even though distribution unambiguously affects welfare, the normative maximand. The now-conventional justification for disregarding distribution is the claim of tax superiority: that...