Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman talk about their book, Mine! with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Heller and Salzman argue that ownership is trickier and more complicated than it looks. While we tend to think of something as either mine or not mine, there's often ambiguity and a continuum about who owns what. Salzman and Heller explore a wide and surprising range of property rights from everyday life. The conversation includes a discussion of the insights of Ronald Coase on the assignment of property rights when rights conflict.
Michael Heller: Yeah. This is really the contribution that we can make to your economics listeners, who think of mine, often, as an on/off switch. And what we do in the book is--and each of the chapters takes one of these--is laid out the six simple stories.So, attachment is: My home is my castle. Like, what's attached to that deed of paper? How much resource control do you have when you say, 'I control this two dimensional plane?' What else do I get? Attachment.First in Time. First come, first served. This is how kids decide who gets the swing on the playground, that's how geosynchronous satellites are--space is claimed in orbit. It's used all the time. Who gets first. Firstborn son, historically, for inheritance. So, First in Time is the second one.Possession. Possession is nine tenths of the law. It's mine because I'm holding on to it. That's the parking chair example, right? Possession is this very powerful language that we all speak, but we don't realize that we're speaking all day long, every day.So, attachment, first, and possession are three.Labor is the fourth. It's mine because I worked for it. You reap what you sow. This one is the basis for our intuitions about intellectual property, about patents, about copyrights, why we reward those that--innovative effort. It's the emotional feeling behind it: It's mine because I worked for it.The fifth one is self-ownership. It's mine because it comes from my body. So, your genetic data, why is that yours? Does it belong to you or the gene company?And the sixth and final one is family. Birth and death, marriage and divorce, those are the moments when, really, a lot of wealth in our country moves around. So, there's a notion that the meek shall inherit the earth, but the reality under American law is that the meek actually get very little.So, that's it. Attachment, First, and Possession--that was the airline seat. Labor, Self-Ownership, and Family.That's the only stories that people use and it's all the stories that people use to claim every resource in the world.
The day before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed a new eviction moratorium last week, the Biden administration conceded that the agency had no legal authority to do so. The fact that Joe Biden was unfazed by that crucial point does not bode well for a president who was supposed to restore respect for the rule of law."To date," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in an August 2 press release, "CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and her team have been unable to find legal authority for a new, targeted eviction moratorium." Senior presidential adviser Gene Sperling used nearly identical language at a press briefing the same day, saying the CDC had concluded it lacked legal authority "even for a more targeted eviction moratorium that would focus just on counties with higher rates of COVID spread."Walensky nevertheless issued such an order, covering about 90 percent of the country, the following evening, calling it "the right thing to do to keep people in their homes and out of congregate settings where COVID-19 spreads." The idea that government officials can ignore the law as long as they are doing "the right thing," long favored by authoritarians and demagogues, is anathema in a constitutional republic.
Rudy Giuliani's New York law license was suspended on Thursday, after a state appeals court found he had lied in arguing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from his client, former U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Senate Democrats' tactic to speed-read a lengthy bill on the Senate floor in 2019 violated the state constitution,
The state constitution requires bills be read at length by request, and it would have taken days to read the 2,000-word bill. Senate Democrats in response used five computers to simultaneously read the bill at 650 words per minute each to speed up the reading.
Last July, in a suburb north of Dallas, a fugitive took refuge in a suburban house that was listed for sale. After a prolonged standoff, a SWAT team stormed the house, launching tear-gas grenades through windows, knocking down doors, leveling a fence with an armored vehicle. When the smoke cleared, it seemed as if the nightmare was over, but for the homeowner, it had just begun.Vicki Baker, who owned the home, had spent a year fixing it up to sell it. In fact, it was under contract and set to close a few days after the raid. But afterwards, the buyer understandably walked away. The home was in a shambles and both the city and Vicki’s insurance company refused to pay for the lion’s share of what it would eventually cost to repair her house. The city effectively said, “tough luck.â€That’s not merely unfair; it’s unconstitutional. When the government deliberately destroys an innocent owner’s property in service of the public good—in this case, public safety—it is obligated to compensate that owner. In this case, the police determined that the public benefit of apprehending a fugitive outweighed the costs of destroying the house he was inside. That was their decision to make, but—under both the federal and Texas constitutions—they must pay for it.
