Law Commons^™

Privatization In Germany: A Model For Legal And Functional Analysis, Martin E. Elling

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article, Mr. Elling discusses the efforts to restructure and privatize the eastern German economy. The Article focuses on the work of the Trust Agency, or Treuhandanstalt, the agency primary responsible for privatizing property expropriated by the Nazis, the Soviet occupation forces, and the German Democratic Republic. These three regimes expropriated property under varying circumstances, and the Trust Agency now faces the task of determining the appropriate level of compensation or restitution for each property claimant. While the Trust Agency is concerned with awarding just compensation to the rightful property owners, the author notes that Germany designed the privatization …

Property And Liberty Reconsidered, Herman Belz

Vanderbilt Law Review

This perceptive, lucid, and sympathetic account of property rights in American constitutional law by Professor James W. Ely, Jr., is further evidence of the conservative challenge to liberal orthodoxy that has emerged in recent years in American historiography. That the book appears under the cosponsorship of the Organization of American Historians, one of the more militantly liberal scholarly associations in the United States, is a small but significant sign of the changing intellectual climate.

As conceived of in contemporary liberal historiography, protection of individual property rights is but one element of economic liberty. Equally if not more important, according to …

From Libertarianism To Egalitarianism, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

A standard natural rights argument for libertarianism is based on the labor theory of property: the idea that I own my self and my labor, and so if I "mix" my own labor with something previously unowned or to which I have a have a right, I come to own the thing with which I have mixed by labor. This initially intuitively attractive idea is at the basis of the theories of property and the role of government of John Locke and Robert Nozick. Locke saw and Nozick agreed that fairness to others requires a proviso: that I leave "enough …

A Bitter Inheritance: East German Real Property And The Supreme Constitutional Court's "Land Reform" Decision Of April 23, 1991, Jonathan J. Doyle

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article briefly examines the principal expropriatory measures undertaken between 1945 and 1989, the agreements between the two German governments relating thereto, and the divisive constitutional issues raised by this fusion of two antithetical legal systems in the area of property law. The text concludes with an analysis of the German Supreme Court's "Land Reform" decision and the juridical controversy surrounding it.