In the end, the book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of an intriguing subject, accessible to anyone with a minimal background in economics. (An introductory chapter introduces the handful of assumptions embedded in the text's economics and law).

Is private ownership an inviolate right that individuals can wield as they see fit? Or is it better understood in more collective terms, as an institution that communities reshape over time to promote evolving goals? What should it mean to be a private landowner in an age of sprawling growth and declining biological diversity? These provocative questions lie at the heart of this perceptive and wide-ranging new book by legal scholar and conservationist Eric Freyfogle. Bringing together insights from history, law, philosophy, and ecology, Freyfogle undertakes a fascinating inquiry into the ownership of nature, leading us behind publicized and contentious disputes over open-space regulation, wetlands protection, and wildlife habitat to reveal the foundations of and changing ideas about private ownership in America. Drawing upon ideas from Thomas Jefferson, Henry George, and Aldo Leopold and interweaving engaging accounts of actual disputes over land-use issues, Freyfogle develops a powerful vision of what private ownership in America could mean—an ownership system, fair to owners and taxpayers alike, that fosters healthy land and healthy economies.

Common property economics defines and clarifies the theoretical distinction between open access and common property and empirically tests the adequacy of resource allocation under common property and empirically tests the property in comparison with private property. Group use of natural resources has often received the blame for overexploitation and mismanagement, whether of fisheries, grazing land, oil and gas pools, groundwater, or wildlife. In this book two types of group use are identified: open access and utilization without any controls on extraction rates, a situation in which resource overexploitation often occurs. In contrast, common property refers to the situation where the group controls the access to and extraction rates of the resource. The common property solutions differ from those associated with open access. The nonoptimality of open access is demonstrated with graphic, game theoretic, and mathematical models. The necessary and sufficient conditions for common property to overcome the difficulties of open access are examined. Stevenson discusses historical examples, the basis in legal concepts, the contrast with public goods, the formation, and the stability of common property. In a detailed, empirical study of alpine grazing in Switzerland, the author compares the performance of common property with that of private property. He also notes the similarity in structure between the Swiss grazing commons and the English open field system.

Examining the origin and development of the private property rights system from prehistory to the present day This book debunks three false claims commonly accepted by contemporary political philosophers regarding property systems: that inequality is natural, inevitable, or incompatible with freedom; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system; and that the normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world in which we live support a capitalist system with strong, individualist and unequal private property rights. The authors review the history of the use and importance of these claims in philosophy, and use thorough anthropological and historical evidence to refute them. They show that societies with common-property systems maintaining strong equality and extensive freedom were initially nearly ubiquitous around the world, and that the private property rights system was established through a long series of violent state-sponsored aggressions.

Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that these rights are justified because creators and inventors deserve compensation for their labour, because their ideas and expressions are their personal property and because the total amount of creative work and innovation increases when inventors and creators have a prospect of generating high income through the exploitation of their monopoly rights. Andreas Von Gunten shows in this essay that the classical arguments for the justification of private intellectual property rights can be contested, and that there are many good reasons to abolish intellectual property rights completely in favour of an intellectual commons where every person is allowed to use every cultural expression and invention in whatever way he wishes.

First published in 2000. The materials in this collection are drawn from many disciplines, including economics, law, philosophy and political science. Yet they are all directed to a topic that is worthy of examination from multiple perspectives: Liberty, Property and the Law. Stated in this general form, this topic is as broad as law itself. Lawyers must have recourse to the grand principles of economic and social thought, but tempered with an awareness of how the novel circumstances of an individual case can call into question some of the elements of the grandest of theories. In this volume, therefore, the emphasis is as much on the points that separate different forms of property as it is on the conceptual theme that links all forms of property rights together.

A new understanding of the causes and consequences of incomplete property rights in countries across the world.