Law Commons^™

Intergenerational Communities, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Under the human flourishing theory of property, owners have obligations, positive as well as negative, that they owe to members of the various communities to which they belong. But are the members of those communities limited to living persons, or do they include non-living persons as well, i.e., future persons and the dead? This Article argues that owners owe two sorts of obligation to non-living members of our generational communities, one general, the other specific. The general obligation is to provide future generations with the basic material background conditions that are necessary for them to be able to carry out …

History As Ideology In The Basic Property Course, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Why has history played such a prominent role in the basic property course in the twentieth century? Such a loaded question requires some explanation. Legal history is doubtless used in all the first-year common-law courses, but I have the impression that since Langdell's time it has been more conspicuous in property than in the other basic courses. At least let us provisionally accept this rather dogmatic assertion in order to examine the more interesting questions: what function has the historical perspective served in property, and what other function might history serve in the course?

Pensions And Passivity, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

This article discusses how modem fiduciary law has extended equity's tradition of constructing ownership as passive through the corporate pension system. It examines how the corporate pension system as a mode of owning pooled capital is a new stage of passive ownership. This stage creates a different aspect of the familiar problem of separating control from beneficial ownership. Berle and Means argued that the problem that the separation of control from ownership created was economic. The interests of managers and shareholders in the modern corporation diverge, and, they argued, this divergence diminishes the overall efficiency of the modern economy, dominated …

Michelman As Doctrinalist, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Presented at the 2004 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference.

Dilemmas Of Group Autonomy: Residential Associations And Community, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

We are a society of groups. De Tocqueville's observation that the principle of association shapes American society remains as valid today as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. For us, as for others, the vita activa is participation in a seemingly limitless variety of groups. The importance of group activity in our national character has strongly influenced the agenda of political questions that recur in American political and legal theory. One of the fundamental normative questions on this agenda concerns the proper relationship between groups and the polity. To what extent should the polity foster connections between associations and the …

The Limits Of Property Reparations, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Human history is replete with examples of unjustified expropriations of property by conquering states and other transitory regimes. Only in modern times, however, have nations attempted systematically to remedy historical injustices by providing reparations to the dispossessed owners or their successors. From the aboriginal peoples of the Antipodes to the Native Americans of Canada and the U.S. to the European victims of the German and Soviet communism, groups of people who were stripped of their land and possessions by fraud or force are demanding, and in many cases getting, reparations for these injustices. The thesis of this paper is that …

Ownership And Obligations: The Human Flourishing Theory Of Property, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Private property ordinarily triggers notions of individual rights, not social obligations. The core image of property rights, in the minds of most people, is that the owner has a right to exclude others and owes no further obligation to them. That image is highly misleading. Property owners owe far more responsibilities to others, both owners and non-owners, than the conventional imagery of property rights suggests. Property rights are inherently relational, and because of this characteristic, owners necessarily owe obligations to others. But the responsibility, or obligation, dimension of private ownership has been sorely under-theorised. Inherent in the concept of ownership …

Eminent Domain And Secondary Rent-Seeking, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.

Takings, Narratives, And Power, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

"The Regulatory Takings Problem" is the title given to a story, or narrative, that has become prominent in the literature on just compensation issues. The story is one of power and fear. It is about a perceived imbalance of power between the two groups of actors involved in the process of public land-use regulation--private landowners and government regulators. It depicts scenarios of past or threatened abuse of power by local land-use regulators, and it looks to the takings clause generally and regulatory takings doctrine specifically as crucial corrective devices, essential to set the power imbalance aright. The dominant narrative describes …

Property As A Fundamental Constitutional Right? The German Example, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.

Ademption And The Domain Of Formality In Wills Law, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

The 1990 revision of the Uniform Probate Code ("UPC") marks the second stage of probate reform in the second half of this century. The first stage was the adoption of the original UPC. While it included some changes in the substantive law of wills, its primary objective was to simplify probate procedure. The second stage, by contrast, focuses almost entirely on the substantive law of wills and will substitutes. It changes several of the primary rules of wills law, including the traditional rule requiring strict compliance with execution formalities. It also makes significant changes in the subsidiary rules of wills …

A Statement Of Progressive Property, Gregory S. Alexander, Eduardo M. Peñalver, Joseph W. Singer, Laura S. Underkuffler

Gregory S Alexander

What would a progressive theory of property look like? Although such a theory might take root within any number of specific normative frameworks, this Statement of Progressive Property outlines several features progressive theories of property should have in common. The Statement argues that we should understand property as both an idea and an institution, that property confers power and shapes community, both in its legal and social dimensions, and that property should be understood as serving plural and incommensurable values whose accommodation is possible through reasoned deliberation and practical judgment.

Alternative Models Of Ante-Mortem Probate And Procedural Due Process Limitations On Succession, Gregory S. Alexander, Albert M. Pearson

Gregory S Alexander

Ante-mortem probate stands as a significant recent development in the American law of wealth succession. It confronts a problem that seriously impairs our probate system, the depredatious will contest, and promises to help revitalize the probate process. Already enacted in several states and currently under active study by the Joint Editorial Board of the Uniform Probate Code and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, ante-mortem probate is likely to be widely implemented in some form. But while legislators and academics alike support ante-mortem probate as a general idea, disagreement has emerged over the specific form it should …

Time And Property In The American Republican Legal Culture, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Modern historians including J.G.A. Pocock and Gordon Wood have demonstrated the degree to which revolutionary American political discourse incorporated "civic republican" notions of virtue, property, and citizenship that promoted stable land ownership and active political participation. These historians also have argued that the republican view soon gave way to the now-dominant liberal view that champions the alienability of property and private over public life. Professor Alexander argues that this history is too neat. In fact, American republicanism contained unreconciled "dialectical" tensions—between individual rights and societal goals, stability of ownership and wealth redistribution, historical continuity and change—that, though now expressed in …

Ten Years Of Takings, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No area of property law has been more controversial in the past decade than takings. No aspect of constitutional law more sharply poses the dilemma about the legitimate powers of the regulatory state than the just compensation question. No question concerning constitutional property is more intractable than what sorts of government regulatory actions constitute uncompensated "takings" of private property. Limitations of space, not to mention my own ambivalence about many of the issues, prevent me from developing a complete normative theory of the proper scope of the Takings Clause. My aim here is vastly more modest: to outline the basic …

"Takings" Jurisprudence In The U.S. Supreme Court: The Past 10 Years, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No area of American property law has been more controversial in recent years than the government regulation of uses of private property. No aspect of American constitutional law more sharply poses the dilemma about the legitimate powers of the regulatory state than the requirement that the government pay compensation for takings of property. The purpose of this essay is to acquaint the non-American legal scholar who is unfamiliar with the recent developments in the United States Supreme Court “takings” jurisprudence. The essay does not presuppose any background knowledge about either American constitutional or property law. Instead it attempts to familiarize …

Commentaries: The Ambiguous Work Of “Natural Property Rights”, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

The three fascinating papers by Dick Helmholz, Jim Ely, and Mark Tushnet prompt me to ask, why was there so much talk among late 18th and 19th century American lawyers about property as a "natural" right and why has the language persisted today? More specifically, what work is the rhetoric of "natural property rights" intended to do? This is not the proper occasion for developing anything like complete answers to those questions, but I do want to offer three lines of thought that might begin to approach a fuller explanation of the puzzling persistence of natural-property-rights talk.

Comparing The Two Legal Realisms—American And Scandinavian, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of Property In Private And Constitutional Law: The Ideology Of The Scientific Turn In Legal Analysis, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

In recent academic writing on the general problem of constitutional protection of property under the takings clause and due process clauses, a mode of analysis has emerged that is evidently different from the conventional analysis of constitutional property claims. In general terms, this new mode is characterized by an effort to analyze claims on an openly teleological and systematic basis. To be sure, this mode is not exclusively of recent origin. But it is a discernible trend in the body of scholarship that discusses constitutional protection of property in the context of previously unfamiliar sorts of private economic interests. Most …

Properties Of Community, Gregory S. Alexander, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Gregory S Alexander

Theories of property presuppose conceptions of community, and of the individual's relationship to community. In contrast to the dominant theories of community at work within most Anglo-American property theorizing, which view community obligations as fundamentally instrumental and contractual, we propose in this paper a theory that views the relationship between the individual and community as constitutive and substantive. Human beings' dependence on others to flourish imposes on political communities and their individual members a shared obligation to foster and contribute to the creation and maintenance of those structures necessary for that flourishing. This obligation in turn qualifies individual rights of …

The Conservatorship Model: A Modification, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Reform-minded probate lawyers have discussed the idea of ante-mortem probate for many years. Yet, owing to several seemingly unavoidable defects, it has never attracted widespread support and only recently has been implemented anywhere in the United States. In his article, Living Probate: The Conservatorship Model, Professor John Langbein has eliminated many of those defects and has made the idea much more feasible. In doing so, he has contributed to the development of simple, convenient, and efficient systems of probate. However, his proposal introduces new flaws that threaten the practical working of his procedural model. Basically, Langbein proposes that living probate …

Takings And The Post-Modern Dialectic Of Property, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.

Property As Propriety, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.

Unborn Communities, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Do property owners owe obligations to members of future generations? Although the question can be reframed in rights-terms so that it faces rights-oriented theories of property, it seems to pose a greater challenge to those theories of property that directly focus on the obligations that property owners owe to others rather than (or, better, along with) the rights of owner. The challenge is compounded where such theories emphasize the relationships between individual property owners and the various communities to which they belong. Do those communities include members of future generations? This paper addresses these questions as they apply to a …

Reply: The Complex Core Of Property, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.

Freedom, Coercion, And The Law Of Servitudes, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

What do we want from a restatement of servitude law? Doctrinal simplification presents one obvious objective. Property teachers and their students commonly observe that the law of servitudes is a mess. However, doctrinal simplification surely does not present the only objective of the restatement. Developing a unified body of servitude doctrine, by itself, merely creates a sense of aesthetic coherence. Presumably the project aims at achieving more than just that. Law reformers generally seek to enhance the legal system's substantive coherence. At this level--developing a set of substantively coherent doctrinal practices--I am skeptical about the servitude restatement project.

A restatement …

Property's Ends: The Publicness Of Private Law Values, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Property theorists commonly suppose that property has as its ends certain private values, such as individual autonomy and personal security. This Essay contends that property’s real end is human flourishing, that is, living a life that is as fulfilling as possible. Human flourishing, although property’s ultimate end, is neither monistic nor simple. Rather, it is inclusive and comprises multiple values. Those values, the content of human flourishing, derives, at least in part, from an understanding of the sorts of beings we are―social and political. A consequence of this conception of the human condition is that the values that constitute human …

The Dead Hand And The Law Of Trusts In The Nineteenth Century, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

This article discusses a basic paradox at the core of liberal property law. Individual freedom to dispose of consolidated bundles of rights cannot simultaneously be allowed and fully maintained. If the donor of a property interest tries to restrict the donee's freedom to dispose of that interest, the legal system, in deciding whether to enforce or void that restriction, must resolve whose freedom it will protect, that of the donor or that of the donee. Although post-realist American property lawyers acknowledge this conflict, at least nominally, it did not emerge in legal consciousness in so starkly visible a form until …

The Publicness Of Private Land Use Controls, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Real burdens, or land-use "servitudes" as they are called in the United States, are usually thought of as strictly private legal devices. Yet in many countries, including the United States, they serve public functions. They are used to constitute residential community associations. These institutions differ from traditional civil society institutions in that they are designed to provide public goods in much the same way as cities do. Generally, they allocate public goods more efficiently than do local governments, which are unable to respond to differences in preferences for various goods and services within given political boundaries. At the same time, …

Properties Of Property, Gregory Alexander, Hanoch Dagan

Gregory S Alexander

Broadly interdisciplinary, Properties of Property provides an overview of cutting-edge work from leading legal scholars as well as important non-legal scholars. The text is designed for an international audience, particularly teachers, scholars, and students throughout Europe, the British Commonwealth, and China. Properties of Property is perfectly suited for courses and seminars in other departments, from history to urban planning, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. It is a must for any law school library, even if no seminar on property theory is offered, because it appeals to law school students as well as scholars and graduate students interested in …