Law Commons^™

Making Virtual Things, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

People value virtual things—such as NFTs—because such assets trigger and satisfy deep-seated narratives of property and ownership. The cause of the recent series of failures to regulate virtual assets, and the resulting crashes, has been a failure to take seriously the ways people perceive and use the assets. Current legal frameworks fail to support buyers’ and users’ expectations of ownership in virtual things they purchase.

Making virtual things is a matter of social construction of value. Virtual things, like real-world things, have value because a community values them for a purpose. It therefore makes no sense to discount how and …

Property As The Law Of Virtual Things, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

Property law in the twentieth century moved from the law of things to the law of rights in things. This was a process of fragmentation: Under Hohfeldian property, we conceive of property as a bundle of sticks, and those sticks can be moved to different holders; the right to possess can be separated from the record ownership right, for example. The downside of Hohfeld's model is that physical objects—things—become informationally complicated. Thing-ness constrains the extravagances of Hohfeldian property: although we can split off the right to possess from the right to exclude, use, destroy, copy, manage, repair, and so on, …

The Meaning Of Dispossession, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

This Article critiques our focus on possession as the cornerstone of theories of property, examining the limitations of possession both as a theoretical concept and as a practical one. Second, the article examines how an investment-based labor approach has sharply shaped out understandings of possession. By examining the intertwining of possession and labor during colonization, the article describes how the labor approach to possession excluded more communal corollaries and instilled in American property law a consistent push toward grounding land claims at the labor-possession nexus.

Re-thinking the labor-possession nexus yields important shifts. First, labor matters for other reasons than investment-backed …

Bitproperty, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

Property is the law of lists and ledgers. County land records, stock certificate entries, mortgage registries, UCC filings on personal property, United States Copyright and Patent registries of interests in intellectual property, bank accounts, domain name systems, and consumers’ Kindle eBook collections in the cloud — all are merely entries in a list, determining who owns what.

Each such list has suffered under a traditional limitation. To prevent falsification or duplication, a single entity must maintain the list, and users must trust (and pay) that entity. As a result, transactions must proceed at significant expense and delay. Yet zero or …

Finding Possession: Labor, Waste And The Evolution Of Property, Jill M. Fraley

Scholarly Articles

Although possession has long been intimately linked to labor, recent historical work on land claims during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that the clash of divergent legal cultures of possession drove the two apart. This clash yielded an American concept of possession much more deeply connected to industrialization than the traditional understanding of labor. By providing evidence of how our concept of labor was industrialized, this article questions the outcomes in modem possession cases, particularly as they impact development and environmental preservation in rural areas.

Virtual Property, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

This article explores three new concepts in property law. First, the article defines an emerging property form - virtual property - which is not intellectual property, but that more efficiently governs rivalrous, persistent, and interconnected online resources. Second, the article demonstrates that the threat to high-value uses of internet resources is not the traditional tragedy of the commons that results in overuse. Rather, the naturally layered nature of the internet leads to overlapping rights of exclusion that cause underuse of internet resources: a tragedy of the anticommons. And finally, the article shows that the common law of property can act …

Nollan V. California Coastal Commission, Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Supreme Court Case Files

No abstract provided.

Reed V. Campbell, Individually And As Administrix Of The Estate Of Ricker, Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Supreme Court Case Files

No abstract provided.