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Smith, Henry E --- "Introduction" [2011] ELECD 144; in Ayotte, Kenneth; Smith, E. Henry (eds), "Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law

Editor(s): Ayotte, Kenneth; Smith, E. Henry

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847209795

Section Title: Introduction

Author(s): Smith, Henry E

Number of pages: 8

Extract:

Introduction
Henry E. Smith


Property rights and property systems vary along a large number of dimensions, and
economics has proven very fruitful in analyzing these patterns and even the nature of
the institution of property itself. In its early days, the efficiency of various features of
property law dominated the economic analysis of property, like law and economics
more generally. This first generation of economic analysis of property dovetailed with
one of the prime legacies of the policy-oriented anti-formalist legal realism school that
started in the 1920s: the bundle of rights or `bundle of sticks' picture of property. On the
`bundle' view, property is simply a collection of rights, duties, privileges, liabilities, and
so on, and attaching the label `property' is more or less a matter of taste. Economically
a `property right' could be any of these individual sticks ­ any socially sanctioned expec-
tation to be able to take valued actions with respect to a resource, availing against one
or more others. So the expectation of sowing crops or building a house was property,
as was the larger collection of property rights we might more conventionally call own-
ership. The task of economic analysis appeared to be to evaluate these sticks for their
cost-effectiveness. As a grab bag of rules and other institutional features, property was
no different from torts or contracts.
More recent economic analysis of property law has begun to address what is special
about property. The chapters in this volume exemplify this new direction ...