Law Commons^™

Property Outlaws, Eduardo Moises Peñalver, Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

Most people do not hold those who intentionally flout property laws in particularly high regard. The overridingly negative view of the property lawbreaker as a "wrongdoer" comports with the status of property rights within our characteristically individualist, capitalist, political culture. This reflexively dim view of property lawbreakers is also shared, to a large degree, by property theorists, many of whom regard property rights as a relatively fixed constellation of entitlements that collectively produce stability and efficiency through an orderly system of ownership. In this Article, Professors Peihalver and Katyal seek partially to rehabilitate the reviled character of the intentional property …