Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2013
ISSN
0042-2533
Publisher
Vanderbilt University Law School
Language
en-US
Abstract
In the United States, property debates revolve around two conceptual models of property: the ownership model, originally developed in Europe and now revisited by information theorists and classical liberal theorists of property, and the bundle of rights model, invented in the United States by Hohfeld and the Realists. This article retrieves an alternative concept of property, the tree concept of property. The tree concept of property was developed by European property scholars between 1900 and the 1950s, as part of Europe’s own “realist” moment. It envisions property as a tree: the trunk representing the owner’s right to govern the use of a resource, and the branches representing the many resource-specific property regimes present in modern legal systems (family property, agricultural property, affordable housing property, intellectual property etc.). This article argues that the tree concept of property provides a descriptively more accurate and normatively richer account of property than the two currently dominant models.
Recommended Citation
Anna di Robilant,
Property: A Bundle of Sticks or a Tree?
,
in
66
Vanderbilt Law Review
869
(2013).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/76
Comments
Boston University School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 14-26