What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?

What Happened to Property?however, such talk of a special category of rights related to things presumably illustrates the grip of conceptualism on the civilian mind and a slavish devotion to the gods of Roman law.Or does it?In related work, we have argued that, far from being a quaint aspect of the Roman or feudal past, the in rem character of property and its consequences are vital to an understanding of property as a legal and economic institution.'Because core property rights attach to persons only through the intermediary of some thing, they have an impersonality and generality that is absent from rights and privileges that attach to persons directly.When we encounter a thing that is marked in the conventional manner as being owned, we know that we are subject to certain negative duties of abstention with respect to that thing-not to enter upon it, not to use it, not to take it, etc.And we know all this without having any idea who the owner of the thing actually is.In effect, these universal duties are broadcast to the world from the thing itself.Because property rights create duties that attach to "everyone else," they provide a basis of security that permits people to develop resources and plan for the future.By the same token, however, this feature of property imposes an informational burden on large numbers of people, a burden that goes far beyond the need for nonparties to a contract to understand the rights and duties of contractual partners.As a consequence, property is required to come in standardized packages that the layperson can understand at low cost.This feature of property-that it comes in a fixed, mandatory menu of forms, in contrast to contracts that are far more customizable-constitutes a deep design principle of the law that is rarely articulated explicitly.The fact that the in rem aspect of property has largely disappeared from academic discourse has made this latent design principle all the easier to overlook.This Essay will trace the decline of the conception of property as a distinctive in rem right in Anglo-American thought, and the rise of the view among modern legal economists that property is simply a list of use rights in particular resources.As is the case with law and economics more generally, this view of property finds its roots in Ronald Coase's seminal article, The Problem of Social Cost.' Coase implied that property has no