Henry E. Smith
Equity as Meta-Law
This Article interprets equity as law about law, or meta-law. Equity specializes in solving complex and uncertain problems, especially those involving multiple parties, conflicting rights, and opportunism. The Article reconstructs this function, diagnoses the ills of current equity, and charts a path forward for equity in our legal system.
Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information
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 terms of forgone use than in the law of tangible property. But if intellectual property does not solve...
What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?
111 Yale L.J. 357 (2001) Property has fallen out of fashion. Although people are as concerned as ever with acquiring and defending their material possessions, in the academic world there is little interest in understanding property. To some extent, this indifference reflects a more general skepticism about the value of conceptual analysis, as opposed to functional assessment of institutions. There...
Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle
110 Yale L.J. 1 (2000) In all postfeudal legal systems, the basic ways of owning property are limited in number and standardized, in the sense that courts will enforce as property only interests that are built from a list of recognized forms. In the common law, this principle has no name and is invoked only semiconsciously; it is known in...