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History As Ideology In The Basic Property Course, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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?


The Ambiguous Work Of "Natural Property Rights", Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

The Ambiguous Work Of "Natural Property Rights", Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Pensions And Passivity, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Takings, Narratives, And Power, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 …


The Transformation Of Trusts As A Legal Category, 1800-1914, Gregory Alexander Dec 2014

The Transformation Of Trusts As A Legal Category, 1800-1914, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Sometimes we are least aware of that which most affects us. So it seems with respect to legal categories. Lawyers do not take legal categories very seriously today. But they should. Legal categories are central to legal reasoning; indeed it is almost impossible to imagine legal reasoning without the use of categories. Categorical thinking affects every area of law. The purpose of this article is to illuminate, through a case-study, the contingent and ideological character of legal categories. It focuses on the development of trusts into and then as a discrete legal category during the period between the beginning of …


The Social-Obligation Norm In American Property Law, Gregory Alexander Dec 2014

The Social-Obligation Norm In American Property Law, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Forty Years Of Codification Of Estates And Trusts Law: Lessons For The Next Generation, Gregory S. Alexander, Mary L. Fellows Dec 2014

Forty Years Of Codification Of Estates And Trusts Law: Lessons For The Next Generation, Gregory S. Alexander, Mary L. Fellows

Gregory S Alexander

In this paper we develop two theses. First, we argue that uniform law proposals that ask courts and practitioners to abandon revered legal traditions and ways of thinking about estates and trusts, even when they are intent-furthering proposals, face resistance until in time the glories of the past and the risks of a new legal regime fade in importance in legal thought. Second, we argue that, especially within an environment in which states seek to gain competitive advantage over their counterparts in other states, the glories of the past and the risks of a new legal regime fade fastest when …


Playing With Fire, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

Playing With Fire, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Properties Of Community, Gregory Alexander, Eduardo Peñalver Dec 2014

Properties Of Community, Gregory Alexander, Eduardo Peñalver

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Innovating Property, Reviewing Stuart Banner, American Property: A History Of How, Why, And What We Own, Gregory Alexander Dec 2014

Innovating Property, Reviewing Stuart Banner, American Property: A History Of How, Why, And What We Own, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


A Statement Of Progressive Property, Gregory S. Alexander, Eduardo M. Peñalver, Joseph W. Singer, Laura S. Underkuffler Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 …


The Complex Core Of Property, Gregory Alexander Dec 2014

The Complex Core Of Property, Gregory Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Time And Property In The American Republican Legal Culture, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

"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 …


Dilemmas Of Group Autonomy: Residential Associations And Community , Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Commentary On Presentations Of Prof. Roberta S. Karmel & Prof. James A. Fanto, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

Commentary On Presentations Of Prof. Roberta S. Karmel & Prof. James A. Fanto, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


Commentaries: The Ambiguous Work Of “Natural Property Rights”, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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.


Demythologizing Property And The Illusion Of Rules: A Response To Two Friendly Critics, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

Demythologizing Property And The Illusion Of Rules: A Response To Two Friendly Critics, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

No abstract provided.


A Cognitive Theory Of Fiduciary Relationships, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

A Cognitive Theory Of Fiduciary Relationships, Gregory S. Alexander

Gregory S Alexander

Is there anything special or distinctive about fiduciary relationships? Or is the term "fiduciary" nothing more than a label that obscures rather than clarifies? Recently, several law-and-economics scholars, building on the economic literature on agency costs, have argued that nothing categorically distinguishes fiduciary from nonfiduciary legal relationships. So-called fiduciary relationships, they argue, are nothing more or less than contractual relationships. This Essay hypothesizes that courts possess a fairly well-developed schema of the fiduciary role, but have not developed a comparable schema for ordinary contracting parties. The fiduciary role-schema often makes courts more likely to over-interpret behavior of fiduciaries than in …


Comparing The Two Legal Realisms—American And Scandinavian, Gregory S. Alexander Dec 2014

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 Dec 2014

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 …