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A Theory Of Property, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding its importance, property law has eluded both a consistent definition and a unified conceptual framework. Indeed, modern property scholarship has utterly splintered the field. On the one hand, instrumentalists view property as nothing more than default contract rules. On the other hand, conceptualists proclaim the primacy of in rem, rights and specially privileged rights such as the rights to exclude, to use, and to transfer. Still other legal scholars think of property as a "bundle of sticks" capable of assuming any shape or form.

This Article proposes a unified theory of property predicated on the insight that property law …