Legal directives, whether laws, regulations, or contractual provisions, can be written along a spectrum of specificity, about which behavioral and legal scholarship present conflicting views. We hypothesized that the combination of specificity and monitoring promotes compliance but harms...

This text presents a simple contracting model that captures the role of equity as a safety valve, and shows how it can solve problems posed by opportunists. It also shows that it is often preferable to limit equity, reserving it for use only against those who appear sufficiently likely to be...

This Article proposes that intellectual property's close relationship to property stems from the role that information costs play in the delineation and enforcement of exclusion rights. As theorists have emphasized, the nonrivalness of information causes exclusive rights to be more costly in...

In many situations legal systems use ambiguous standards and moral language in instructing people to behave. In the realm of the common law, much of this ambiguous, morally inflected legal component is associated with “equity.” In civil law systems, something similar goes under the banner of...

The New Private Law takes seriously the need for baselines in general and the traditional ones furnished by the law in particular. One such baseline is the “things” of property. The bundle of rights picture popularized by the Legal Realists downplayed things and promoted the expectation that...

This paper examines the coordination of inputs to the development and use of technology as a problem in the theory of property. Recent misunderstanding of property, in terms of both the substance of its rights and the implications of its remedies, have presented property as an obstacle to –...