Jacob Weinrib (Queen’s University) has posted The Architecture of Property Rights on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Property law theory is divided between two competing models of the architecture of property rights. One holds that property rights have a limited scope but an unlimited strength; the other reverses these commitments, positing an unlimited scope but a limited strength. I argue that instrumentalist approaches to the justification of property law generate this impasse and lack the conceptual resources to resolve it.
Christopher Essert’s remarkable book, Property Law in the Society of Equals, does not directly address this stalemate, yet it nonetheless offers a powerful means of escaping it. Essert develops a non-instrumental justification of property law in which the idea of yours and mine uniquely enables persons to interact as equals with respect to objects and spaces. At the same time, his account provides critical resources for explaining and justifying limits on both the scope and the strength of property rights.
Highly recommended!
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