Law Commons^™

Empowering The Poor: Turning De Facto Rights Into Collateralized Credit, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

The shrinking middle class and the widening gap between the rich and the poor constitute significant threats to social and financial stability. One of the main impediments to upward mobility is the inability of economically disadvantaged people to use their property — in which they sometimes hold only de facto, not de jure, rights — as collateral to obtain credit. This Article argues that commercial law should recognize those de facto rights, enabling the poor to borrow to start businesses or otherwise create wealth. Recognition not only would provide benefits that exceed its costs; it also would be consistent with, …

Cultural Paradigms In Property Institutions, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Do “cultural factors” substantively influence the creation and evolution of property institutions? For the past several decades, few legal scholars have answered affirmatively. Those inclined towards a law and economics methodology tend to see property institutions as the outcome of self-interested and utilitarian bargaining, and therefore often question the analytical usefulness of “culture.” The major emerging alternative, a progressive literature that emphasizes the social embeddedness of property institutions and individuals, is theoretically more accommodating of cultural analysis but has done very little of it.

This Article develops a “cultural” theory of how property institutions are created and demonstrates that such …