Law Commons^™

Natural Law, Assumptions, And Humility, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This review of Natural Property Rights celebrates Eric Claeys’s efforts to resuscitate natural law as a viable approach to property law. Although readers unlikely to be convinced that natural law is the way to best understand property rights, Claeys succeeds in breathing new life into natural law. Natural Property Rights’ emphasis on use as property law’s fundamental value creates space to reconceptualize the rights of property owners and the place of non-owners within a just theory of property rights. The main critiques of Natural Property Rights offered in this review center around the choice to prioritize rights over duties and …

Exploiting The Poor: Housing, Markets, And Vulnerability, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Matthew Desmond provocatively claims that landlords exploit poor tenants in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). This essay celebrates Desmond's work and explores the exploitation claim, focusing on how landlords deliberately exploit vulnerable tenants and on forms of market-based exploitation.

One For All: The Problem Of Uniformity Cost In Intellectual Property Law, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Intellectual property law protects the owner of each patented invention or copyrighted work of authorship with a largely uniform set of exclusive rights. In the modern context, it is clear that innovators' needs for intellectual property protection vary substantially across industries and among types of innovation. Applying a socially costly, uniform solution to problems of differing magnitudes means that the law necessarily imposes uniformity cost by underprotecting those who invest in certain costly innovations and overprotecting those with low innovation costs or access to alternative appropriability mechanisms.

This Article argues that reducing uniformity cost is the central problem for intellectual …

Whose Music Is It Anyway? How We Came To View Musical Expression As A Form Of Property, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Many participants in the music industry consider unauthorized transmissions of music files over the Internet to be theft of their property. Many Internet users who exchange music files reject this characterization. Prompted by the dispute over unauthorized music distribution, this Article explores how those who create and distribute music first came to look upon music as their property and when in Western history the law first supported this view. By analyzing the economic and legal structures governing music making in Western Europe from the classical period in Greece through the Renaissance, the Article shows that the law first granted some …