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Full-Text Articles in Law
Of Property And Antiproperty, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Of Property And Antiproperty, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Michigan Law Review
Private property is widely perceived as a potent prodevelopment and anticonservationist force. The drive to accumulate wealth through private property rights is thought to encourage environmentally destructive development; legal protection of such property rights is believed to thwart environmentally friendly public measures. Indeed, property rights advocates and environmentalists are generally described as irreconcilable foes. This presumed clash often leads environmentalists to urge public acquisition of private lands. Interestingly, less attention is paid to the possibility that the government may prove no better a conservator than private owners. Government actors often mismanage conservation properties, collaborating with private developers to dispose of …
Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Pliability Rules, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Michigan Law Review
In 1543, the Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, determined the heliocentric design of the solar system. Copernicus was motivated in large part by the conviction that Claudius Ptolemy's geocentric astronomical model, which dominated scientific thought at that time, was too incoherent, complex, and convoluted to be true. Hence, Copernicus made a point of making his model coherent, simple, and elegant. Nearly three and a half centuries later, at the height of the impressionist movement, the French painter Claude Monet set out to depict the Ruen Cathedral in a series of twenty paintings, each presenting the cathedral in a different light. Monet's …
Property Rights And Liability Rules: The Ex Ante View Of The Cathedral, Lucian Arye Bebchuk
Property Rights And Liability Rules: The Ex Ante View Of The Cathedral, Lucian Arye Bebchuk
Michigan Law Review
This Article aims to contribute to the study of how the law should allocate and protect entitlements in the presence of externalities. In their classic article published thirty years ago, Calabresi and Melamed studied such questions and offered what they labeled "one view of the Cathedral." I seek to add to the inquiry started by Calabresi and Melamed by offering an ex ante perspective and analyzing how allocations of entitlements affect parties' ex ante actions and investments. Suppose that an upstream Factory would benefit from an activity that would pollute a river and harm an activity conducted by a downstream …
Optimal Delegation And Decoupling In The Design Of Liability Rules, Ian M. Ayres, Paul M. Goldbart
Optimal Delegation And Decoupling In The Design Of Liability Rules, Ian M. Ayres, Paul M. Goldbart
Michigan Law Review
Calabresi and Melamed began a scholarly revolution by showing that legal entitlements have two readily distinguishable forms of protection: property rules and liability rules. These two archetypal forms protect an entitlement holder's interest in markedly different ways - via deterrence or compensation. Property rules protect entitlements by trying to deter others from taking. Liability rules, on the other hand, protect entitlements not by deterring but by trying to compensate the victim of nonconsensual takings. Accordingly, the compensatory impetus behind liability rules focuses on the takee's welfare - making sure the sanction is sufficient to compensate the takee. The deterrent impetus …