Excerpt
2024, Book Chapter: "In both its legal and economic aspects, the law and economics of property rights has employed a thin notion of property. Stemming from Legal Realism and the needs for tractability of models, ownership is treated as a bundle of rights - the right to farm, the right to cultivate, the right to reside on land, or the rights to use an item of personal property in various ways - thereby downplaying the role of things or rights to exclude from them. New tools associated with the theory of complex systems and networks are beginning to allow us to capture the pattern of interrelationships among resources attributes and legal relations. Things and entitlements over them can be seen as emergent structures. Using these tools, law and economics can offer new accounts of system in the law and how it is more flexible and open-ended than is often thought. Various traditional doctrines also more amendable to a functional explanation, as is property law’s institutional role."