This Article explores the history of natural resources law and pollution control law to provide insights into current efforts by states to create wind easements, solar easements, and other property rights in the use of or access to renewable resources. Development of these resources is critical...

Copyright requires us to distinguish between two different ways of transforming a “work of authorship”: “derivative works” and “transformative fair uses.” The absence of a clear line results in a tendency to assign all value arising proximately from a work to copyright owners. Many...

This article summarizes the ideas presented by the author at the Kyoto 3rd World Water Forum. In general, American states and not the national government control water resources. Western states generally define water rights as property rights and apply the prior appropriation doctrine, or...

This article discusses and analyzes the sources and methods used by Leon Duguit in constructing the social-obligation or social-function norm of property as set out in an influential series of lectures in Buenos Aires published in 1912. The work of Henri Hayem has been underappreciated in the...

Investments in reforestation and reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) have the potential to mitigate greenhouse gas accumulation; sustain ecosystem services that support human and ecological communities; and generate sustainable livelihoods for poor, forest-dependent...

Protecting the entitlements of some inherently requires preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. Yet much recent research regarding property rights and economic development treats the level of property rights security in a country as homogeneous. This one-dimensional...

This paper, prepared for a Lincoln Institute conference on "Evolution of Property Rights Related to Land and Natural Resources," and the forthcoming book Property in Land and Other Resources (D.H. Cole and E.Ostrom, eds, forthcoming 2011, Lincoln Institute), argues that, contrary to both the...

Municipalities have become increasingly bold in their use of eminent domain. This sovereign power was once reserved for public works, but municipalities have increasingly used eminent domain for such putatively private projects as building factories, shopping malls, and upscale condominiums -...

Public policy often regards pollution and other measures of poor environmental quality as public bads that result from market failure and require government intervention through regulatory policies and more stringent environmental standards. In this article, I argue that pollution and...

In Sweden, Gustav Cassel, probably the most famous political economist in the world in the years immediately after World War I, was the most outspoken economist to emphasize the importance of secure property rights. He vigorously defended the importance of private property rights for economic...