The traditional view is that patents and prizes stand in stark contrast to one another as means for promoting innovation. On this view, patents are government grants of private property rights that result in market-based, ex post rewards for innovative activity in the form of supracompetitive...

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 -...

Throughout western Europe, beginning about 1200, leasing of lords' estates became more common relative to direct management. In England, however, direct management increased beginning around the same time and until the fourteenth century, and leasing increased thereafter. This article models...

Are property rights obtained through legally dubious means forever tainted with original sin or can rightholders make their ill-gotten gains legitimate by doing good works? This is a critical question for developing countries (and Russia in particular) where privatization is often opaque and...

The Supreme Court decisions in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill on the constitutionality of physician-assisted suicide leave much to be desired. Although this topic has been beaten to death in the literature, the vast majority of commentators have either missed the main point entirely...

Throughout most of history, women as a class have possessed relatively few formal rights. The women of ancient Sparta were a striking exception. Although they could not vote, Spartan women reportedly owned 40 percent of Sparta's agricultural land and enjoyed other rights that were equally...

Recent work on the commons and the anticommons is novel and promising. Briefly, a commons is a resource which all have a liberty-right to use, from which no one has a normative power to exclude others, and which no one has a duty to refrain from exploiting. By contrast, an anticommons is,...

Should property rights be protected absolutely -- by property rules -- or instead by the requirement that infringing parties pay for harm done--that is, by liability rules? In this article, we present a systematic economic analysis of this fundamental question. Our primary object is to explain...

A fundamental legal problem is whether property rights should be protected by property rules or by liability rules. In this Article, we provide a systematic economic analysis of the choice between property and liability rules. We answer a basic question: why is it that liability rules are...

Using command-and-control regulation of land use to produce a public good (as opposed to preventing physical off-property harms) without compensating the landowner can be expected to produce two unintended consequences: (i) management actions by landowners to reduce the land's attractiveness for...