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Full-Text Articles in Law
Inequality Rediscovered, David Singh Grewal, Jedediah S. Purdy
Inequality Rediscovered, David Singh Grewal, Jedediah S. Purdy
Faculty Scholarship
Widespread recognition that economic inequality has been growing for forty years in most of the developed world, and in fact has tended to grow across most of the history of modern economies, shows that the period 1945-1973, when inequality of wealth and income shrank, was a marked anomaly in historical experience. At the time, however, the anomalous period of equality seemed to vindicate a long history of optimism about economic life: that growth would overcome meaningful scarcity and usher in an egalitarian and humanistic period that could almost qualify as post-economic. This has not been the experience of the last …
Property And Sovereignty, Information And Audience, Thomas W. Merrill
Property And Sovereignty, Information And Audience, Thomas W. Merrill
Faculty Scholarship
Morris Cohen’s classic essay, Property and Sovereignty, correctly discerned that political sovereignty and private property are alternative forms of government. Where it failed was in suggesting that the choice between these modes of governance is a matter of dialing one up and the other down. The relationship between political sovereignty and property is complex, and varies depending on the audience of property we have in view. With respect to some audiences – strangers and transactors – those who favor a strong system of property will want to enlist a generous measure of assistance from the political sovereign. With respect to …
From Territorial To Monetary Sovereignty, Katharina Pistor
From Territorial To Monetary Sovereignty, Katharina Pistor
Faculty Scholarship
State sovereignty is closely intertwined with, but not limited to, control over territory and people. It has long been recognized that control over monetary affairs is a critical part of genuine sovereignty. In this Article, I go a step further and argue that the relevance and importance of territorial versus monetary sovereignty has shifted in favor of the latter. This shift goes hand in hand with the rise of credit-based financial systems. Such systems depend, in the last instance, on backstopping by an entity with control over its own money supply and no binding survival constraints. Only states with monetary …