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Property And Collective Undertaking: The Principle Of Numerus Clausus, Avihay Dorfman

Avihay Dorfman

Property rights are subject to the principle of numerus clausus, which is a restriction that means that it cannot be up to the contracting parties - or private persons, more generally - to create new forms of property right, but only to trade rights that take existing forms. What can explain this peculiar limitation? All the answers offered so far by property theorists have marshaled functional explanations either in favor of or against the numerus clausus principle (hereinafter: NC). In this paper I shall set out to articulate a novel explanation of this principle. My argument develops two general claims. …