The two questions I seek to address in these pages are what is public property and why does it matter. Public property, like property more generally, is a powerful legal arrangement of allocating control and use rights with respect to resources. Unlike private property, public property does not...

Privatization has occupied the attention of theorists of different disciplines. Yet, despite the multiplicity of perspectives, the typical arguments concerning privatization are instrumental, relying heavily on comparing the performance of a public functionary with that of its private...

In this critical piece I take stock of current understandings of five basic distinctions in the theoretical study of tort law: First, a meta-theoretical distinction between the law's self-presentation and a commitment to epiphenomenalism; second, between the formal and the substantive theory of...

Private law theory must confront the plurality of values that inform the problems that private law addresses in practice. We consider Hanoch Dagan's and Michael Heller's The Choice Theory of Contracts as a case-study in the promise and perils that embracing plural values poses for private law...

Economic thought has in recent years increasingly departed from the paradigm of narrow self-interestedness to take up other-regarding preferences. We study one class of such preferences - individual preferences for giving. We use graphical representations of modified Dictator Games that vary the...

Proportional representation is often thought a democratic ideal. But whatever proportional representation's virtues in ordinary politics, it is poorly suited to sustaining democratic legitimacy in what might, speaking loosely, be called constitutional politics. Proportional representation may...