Like property, contractual boilerplate is less tailored to its contractual and business environment than one might expect considering only the costs of producing it. Boilerplate, like all legal communication, requires actors to trade off the benefits of information-richness with the need for...

Wesley Hohfeld's scheme of jural relations possesses two fundamental strengths. First, the legal relations tend to correspond closely to potential legal results availing between individual persons – who can sue whom for what. Second, the system of “fundamental” relations possesses a...

In this book chapter, we argue that the distinction between "structure" and "style" is important in understanding the similarities and dissimilarities in common and civil law property. Structure is the functional form the law employs to protect people's use interests, whereas style is a manner...

Fiduciary law is both celebrated as unbound by rules and deplored as unprincipled. Moralists see in fiduciary law a fixed and mandatory system, even as legal economists and contractarians have cast fiduciary law as the ultimate set of defaults to fill in incomplete contracts. Like general...

This handbook chapter argues that part of the controversy over intellectual property stems from inadequacies in the economic theory of property rights. Property is assumed in both law and economics and in New Institutional Economics to be any expectation of being able to act upon or derive value...