The economic analysis of property has made progress in areas of property closest to contracts and torts, where the assumption that legal rules can be studied in isolation has some plausibility. Property law is a system, and economic analysis can be used to capture the role of traditional notions...

In his pioneering work on transaction costs, Ronald Coase presupposed a picture of property as a bundle of government-prescribed use rights. This picture is not only not essential to what Coase was trying to do, but its limitations emerge when we apply Coase’s central insights to analyze the...