Law Commons^™

Critical Approaches To Property Institutions, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …

From The Archives (Such As They Are), Barbara Aronstein Black

Faculty Scholarship

Somewhere, in the mythic past of Langdell and Stone, a few good men decided to create a journal with unpaid student laborers in order to free their time and allow professors to concentrate on outside consulting without having to support their arguments or check their cites. This tradition continues to this day.
—Columbia Law Review Banquet Issue, 1991

I'm quite fond of that account of the origins of law reviews, but, alas, the truth is less colorful. Harvard, as we know, was first-in, truly, the Langdellian past – and there, as everywhere to follow, the Review was the result of …