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Abstract:
In this paper I review, extend, and critique two contrasting approaches to the evolution of property rights. The legal literature on the subject is dominated by a conventional approach, which holds a virtual monopoly despite its many shortcomings, and the literature neglects an alternative approach, despite its many virtues (including, but not limited to, the virtue of responding to many of the conventional approach's deficiencies). The paper provides an overview of both approaches, including a brief intellectual history of each - and should thus inform readers without specialized knowledge of the subject but nevertheless interested in it - and aims among other things to make the alternative approach salient, in particular because an integrated treatment that draws on a combination of the two approaches does more explanatory work than can either approach on its own.

Evolution of property rights, cooperative collective action (COOP), converge (CON)

Abstract:
Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion, Harold Demsetz's Toward a Theory of Property Rights, has a number of well-known (and not so well-known) shortcomings, perhaps because it was never intended to be taken as an evolutionary explanation in the first place. There is, in principle at least, a pretty straightforward fix for the sort of evolutionary approach pursued by followers of Demsetz, but even then that approach - call it the conventional approach - fails to account for very early property rights, right at the genesis. The early developments are better explained by a very different approach based on evolutionary game theory. The game theoretic approach can account for a basic system of property rights rooted in possession; it cannot, however, account for complex property systems. To explain the latter requires the conventional approach. Hence, the two approaches combined suggest a satisfactory account of the origins and development of property rights systems.

Harold Demsetz, property rights, evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS)

Abstract:
The Fifth Amendment's public use requirement - a dead letter for decades - has recently been resurrected by the Michigan Supreme Court, overruling Poletown, and by the United States Supreme Court, granting certiorari in Kelo v. City of New London. At issue in these cases is the government's ability to condemn property from one private property owner and retransfer it to another, usually with a justification of more-or-less indirect economic benefits to the community. This Essay first argues the legitimacy of these government actions exists on a spectrum from true public uses, to public ruses that primarily benefit private interests but have some benefit to the public, to naked transfers that appear to be nothing but giveaways. This Essay argues, however, that the key to resolving these condemn-and-retransfer cases is not injunctive relief but instead a flexible approach to compensation. In particular, the Essay proposes valuing property taken for a public ruse using the government's own economic assumptions about this effect of the condemn-and-retransfer scheme, thus increasing compensation for the property owner and also increasing the government's incentive to make realistic economic predictions. For naked transfers, the Essay proposes gain-based compensation in order to put the government to the test that the condemnation will actually create some surplus public benefit. Ultimately, liability rule protection provides a better solution than property rule protection for condemn-and-retransfer cases.

Takings, Property, Public Use, Kelo

Abstract:
Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation, 118 S Ct 1925 (1998), held that interest generated by the Texas Interest on Lawyers Trust Account (IOLTA) program is the "private property" of the clients who handed over the principal; the Court did not decide whether the IOLTA program worked a "taking," or, if it did, what "just compensation" was due. The debates among the justices about the meaning of private property, argued in terms of contextual and conceptual severance, are unlikely to prove fruitful. We elaborate a better approach that looks to the underlying purposes of just compensation: efficiency and justice are best served by uncoupling matters and methods of deterrence from matters and methods of distribution.

Abstract:
Supreme Court decisions over the last three-quarters of a century have turned the words of the Takings Clause into a secret code that only a momentary majority of the Court is able to understand. The Justices faithfully moor their opinions to the particular terms of the Fifth Amendment, but only by stretching the text beyond recognition. A better approach is to consider the purposes of the Takings Clause, efficiency and justice, and go anew from there. Such a method reveals that in some cases there are good reasons to require payment by the government when it regulates property, but not to insist upon compensation to each aggrieved property owner. In other cases, the opposite is true -- compensation to individuals makes sense, but payment by the responsible government agency does not. Uncoupling efficiency and justice would invigorate the law of takings.