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...

This Article addresses the question of whether cultural property laws, which require archaeological artifacts to remain in countries of origin, have been a boon for nations with extensive archaeological records, as most archaeologists and lawmakers presume, or have hampered archaeological...

Economists often envision commons and anticommons as occurring from either too few or too many rights-claimants over a good. While this perspective has an intuitive appeal, it obfuscates similarities between commons and anticommons, with significant impact on proposed policy solutions. This...

This article examines and questions the traditional justifications for intellectual property (I.P.) rights in America (focusing on copyright and patent law), and explores incentives necessary to induce the creation of these works of information. I conclude that changes are needed to I.P. law in...

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...

A persistent theme in the literature on property rights suggests that perfect state protection of private property rights would provide owners with an optimal incentive to invest in their assets. In this Essay, we challenge this view. Specifically, we argue that in many instances, perfect state...

One of the most acute charges against private property begins with the observation that ownership generates a trespassory duty of exclusion that far exceeds what a commitment to values such as freedom and well-being could possibly require. According to this observation, there exits a mismatch...

It is a commonplace that, within commercial law, the law of personal property is particularly important, and it is also obvious that commercial law deals to a large extent with cross-border transactions and business relationships. This article gives an overview of German moveable property law,...

In theory, property rights allow markets to achieve Pareto optimal allocations. But the literature on contracting largely ignores what happens when property rights are imperfectly defined and enforced. Although some models include weak enforcement or poorly defined rights or "anticommons," this...

"Property rights serve human values." State v. Shack. Every law student needs to emerge from the crucible of first-year property law with a clear understanding that when "O conveys Blackacre to A for life, remainder to B and his heirs," O has created a life estate in A and a future interest, a...