Law Commons^™

Property And Democratic Deliberation: The Numerus Clausus Principle And Democratic Experimentalism In Property Law, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

First-year law students soon become familiar with the numerus clausus principle in property law. The principle holds that there is a limited menu of available standard property forms (the estates, the different types of common or joint ownership, the different types of servitudes) and that new forms are hardly ever introduced. Over the last fifty years, however, property law has changed dramatically. A wealth of new property forms has been added to the list. This dynamism in the list has remained largely unexplored and is the subject of this Article. This Article focuses on a selection of recently created property …

The Shape Of Property, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

“Shape” means “a mode of existence or form of being having identifying features” or the “form or embodiment” of something. Form and feature, in turn, arise from pressure and time. Property law has a shape all its own: it exists as a unique body of law, with distinctive conventions and rules. And that shape, those conventions and rules, derive from a variety of pressures that have, over the centuries, molded property law into its present form. This paper seeks to understand and explain the shape of a particular area of property law – that of property forms.

Of course, this …