Like most wild living resources, fish present a complex management challenge. Given the failure of command and control regulatory regimes to protect fisheries, scholars and practitioners have advocated the use of property rights to rectify the fisheries crisis. This meta analysis argues that...

“How to deal with these illegal buildings?” was the question I was frequently asked in my interviews with government officials in Shenzhen, a Chinese city in which almost half of the buildings were built illegally. To demolish them has proved to be a mission impossible; to legalize them would...

Climate change poses a challenge for maintaining the stable entitlements that are basic to property law. Yet property rights can also serve as aids to climate adaptation. This essay, which was initially delivered as the Wolf Family Lecture on the American Law at the University of Florida,...

The modern state has monopolized the legitimate use of force. This concept is twofold. First, the state is empowered with enforcement rights; second, the rights of the individuals are restricted. In a simple model of property rights with appropriation and defense activity, we show that a...

Whenever the use of an asset by one party imposes an externality on another party's use of an asset, entitlements must be allocated. Does an upstream firm have a right to use a river's water or does a downstream firm have a right not to have the water used? And if the downstream firm is to be...

Renewable energy can become a fraction of the cost of burning carbon to generate electricity in communities that use money that has a usage charge described as "demurrage". As with Islamic banking, demurrage money eliminates discounting future values from the ability of earning interest today....

Nigeria is a prime example of a developing country with ill-defined property rights. However, people still manage to save, mostly through traditional and informal means, facilitated by strong family and community institutions. This paper argues that the government should concentrate on...

Most antitrust scholars agree that vertical and horizontal intrabrand restraints such as minimum resale price maintenance and ancillary exclusive territories usually enhance welfare. Nonetheless, there is not universal agreement regarding how, exactly, such restraints have this impact. Following...

Most of the literature on government intervention in models of voluntary public goods supply focuses on interventions that increase the total level of a public good, which is considered to be typically underprovided. However, an intervention that is successful in increasing the public good level...