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Things Fall Apart: The Illegitimacy Of Property Rights In The Context Of Past Theft, Bernadette Atuahene
Things Fall Apart: The Illegitimacy Of Property Rights In The Context Of Past Theft, Bernadette Atuahene
All Faculty Scholarship
In many states, past property theft is a volatile political issue that threatens to destabilize nascent democracies. How does a state avoid instability when past property theft causes a significant number of people to believe that the property distribution is illegitimate? To explore this question, I first define legitimacy relying on an empirical understanding of the concept. Second, I establish the relationship between inequality, illegitimate property distribution, and instability. Third, I describe the three ways a state can achieve stability when faced with an illegitimate property distribution: by using its coercive powers, by attempting to change people’s beliefs about the …
Evolutionary Theory And The Origin Of Property Rights, James E. Krier
Evolutionary Theory And The Origin Of Property Rights, James E. Krier
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion, Harold Demsetz’s Toward a Theory of Property Rights, has a number of well-known (and not so well-known) shortcomings, perhaps because it was never intended to be taken as an evolutionary explanation in the first place. There is, in principle at least, a pretty straightforward fix for the sort of evolutionary approach pursued by followers of Demsetz, but even then that approach – call it the conventional approach – fails to account for very early property rights, right at the …
Equality, Conscience, And The Liberty Of The Church: Justifying The Controversiale Per Controversialius, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Equality, Conscience, And The Liberty Of The Church: Justifying The Controversiale Per Controversialius, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Working Paper Series
This paper considers the central normative claim of Martha Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality, viz., that the U.S. Constitution’s religion clauses should be construed to provide equal (and extensive) protection to the vulnerable human faculty called conscience. The paper argues that Nussbaum’s argument from Rawlsian political liberalism that leads to her normative constitutional claim amounts, perversely, to an attempt to justify the controversial by the more controversial. The paper goes on to argue that while equality and conscience are concepts that are reasonably contested, Nussbaum illegitimately gives them priority over the also reasonably …
The Nomination Of Sonia Sotomayor To Be An Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States: Hearing Before The S. Comm. On The Judiciary, 111th Cong., July 16, 2009 (Statement Of Professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Geo. U. L. Center), Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz
Testimony Before Congress
I believe that contemporary foreign law generally has no place in the interpretation of the United States Constitution. …I will explain why reliance on foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution is in tension with our constitutional text and structure, and with fundamental notions of democratic self-governance. I should emphasize that I take no position on the ultimate question of whether Judge Sotomayor should be confirmed, and I offer my comments with the greatest respect. But I am concerned that her recent speech on this issue may betray a misconception of the judicial role. For the balance of my testimony, …