Digital Commons Network^™

Conservation Cartels: How Competition Policy Conflicts With Environmental Protection, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

The alleged purpose of antitrust law is to improve consumer welfare by proscribing actions and arrangements that reduce output and increase prices. Conservation seeks to improve human welfare by maximizing the long-term productive use of natural resources, a goal that often requires limiting consumption to sustainable levels. While conservation measures might increase prices in the short run, they enhance consumer welfare by increasing long-term production and ensuring the availability of valued resources over time. That is true whether the restrictions are imposed by a private conservation cartel or a government agency. Insofar as antitrust law fails to take this into …

Free And Green: A New Approach To Environmental Protection, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Most Americans consider themselves environmentalists, yet most experts are dissatisfied with existing environmental regulations, which are both inefficient and inequitable. Worse, many don't serve environmental goals. This article outlines an alternative approach to environmental policy based on market institutions and property rights rather than central-planning and bureaucratic control. The aim is both to improve environmental protection and lessen the costs ? Economic and otherwise ? Of achieving environmental goals. It seeks to ensure that Americans' environmental values are advanced without sacrificing the individual liberties the American government was created to protect.

The problem with current regulatory approaches is not merely …

Review Of Optional Law: The Structure Of Legal Entitlements, Omri Ben-Shahar

Reviews

The concept of "property rights" plays a prominent role in economic theory. Economists have been studying how property rights emerged as a system of allocation, replacing regimes of open access and lack of legal order. Property rights are regularly viewed by economists as the primary policy tool to control the incentives to invest in new assets (e.g., in information) and to maintain existing assets (e.g., fisheries) when contracts are incomplete. Property rights are the endowments that individuals exchange in a market economy, the equity that investors trade in financial markets. Property rights are a basic building block in economics.

The Uselessness Of Public Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court decision of Kelo v. City of New London has been denounced by legal scholars from the entire political spectrum and given rise to numerous legislative proposals to reverse Kelo's deferential interpretation of the Public Use Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and instead, limit the use of eminent domain when taken property is transferred to private hands. In this Essay we argue that the criticisms of Kelo are ill-conceived and misguided. They are based on a narrow analysis of eminent domain that fails to take into account the full panoply of government powers with respect to property. Given …

Listening To All The Voices, Old And New: The Evolution Of Land Ownership In The Modern West, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Takings Cases In The October 2004 Term (Symposium: The Seventeenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Leon D. Lazer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Six Myths About Kelo: Kelo V. City Of New London, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Kelo v. City of New London, 125 S. Ct. 2655 (2005), is unique in the modem annals of law in terms of the negative response it has evoked. The initial reaction by lawyers familiar with the case was one of lack of surprise. Within days, however, Internet bloggers, television commentators, and neighbors talking over backyard fences decided that Keio was an outrage. Even Justice Stevens sought to distance himself from his own majority opinion, declaring in a speech to a bar association that he thought the outcome was "unwise," and that he would not have supported it if he were …