In his pioneering work on transaction costs, Ronald Coase presupposed a picture of property as a bundle of government-prescribed use rights. This picture is not only not essential to what Coase was trying to do, but its limitations emerge when we apply Coase’s central insights to analyze the...

This article argues that the Calabresi and Melamed's “Cathedral” framework of property rules, liability rules, and inalienability rules needs to be extended using the tools of complex systems theory in order to capture important institutional features of the law. As an applied field, law and...