The Contested Commitments of Property (original) (raw)

The means by which property organizes human behavior and social life is the subject of profound and heated debate. On one side, information theorists emphasize that property works in rem, using standardized signals to tell all the world to keep off things owned by others. On the other side, progressive theorists emphasize property’s capacity to promote human flourishing, respect for human dignity, Aristotelian virtue, or democratic governance. The divide between these two schools of thought represents the most vital dispute in a quarter-century of property scholarship, but this Article claims that this divide is not adequately understood.Debates between informational and progressive scholars currently center on whether the right to exclude is fundamental to property law. By contrast, this Article suggests that academics’ singular focus on exclusion has obscured even deeper questions about property’s stability, its institutional mechanism for change, and its very status as a distinct...