In this episode, James Y. Stern, Associate Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, discuss... more In this episode, James Y. Stern, Associate Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, discusses his article Intellectual Property & the Myth of Nonrivalry. Stern begins by describing the conventional economic theory of property and public goods, and how it structures the prevailing view of intellectual property among legal scholars in the United States. Specifically most scholars assume that property conventionally allocates scarce or rival resources, but because information is non-rival, allocation is unnecessary, and the only legitimate goal is providing an incentive for production. He argues that information actually is rival, because different people have different preferences for how it is used. Accordingly, public goods economics cannot provide an empirical justification for intellectual property, which is fundamentally an expression of normative values
This Article examines a characteristic of property entitlements fundamental to the structure of p... more This Article examines a characteristic of property entitlements fundamental to the structure of property systems that has received scant academic attention, a characteristic referred to as the mutual exclusivity principle. According to this principle, a property system does not allow for the existence of incompatible rights. Two people cannot separately be the owners of the same resource, for instance. By contrast, two people can each hold valid but contradictory contract rights to the resource. Although the existing property literature has stressed the “exclusive” nature of property, the various ways in which property is imagined to be exclusive, such as by conferring “rights to exclude,” fail to capture the essence of property as a distinct legal institution. Unlike these alternative conceptions of exclusiveness, the mutual exclusivity principle holds true across the range of different types of property entitlements, including not just fee simple ownership but also security intere...
The 20th century emergence of the incorporation doctrine is regarded as a critical development in... more The 20th century emergence of the incorporation doctrine is regarded as a critical development in constitutional law, but while issues related to the doctrine\u27s justification have been studied and debated for more than fifty years, the causes and mechanics of its advent have received relatively little academic attention. This Essay, part of a symposium on Judge Jeffrey Sutton\u27s recent book about state constitutional law, examines the doctrinal origins of incorporation, in an effort to help uncover why the incorporation doctrine emerged when it did and the way it did. It concludes that, for these purposes, incorporation is best understood as having three basic components, of which First Amendment incorporation predominated. It goes on to show how First Amendment incorporation drew in important ways from existing doctrine, including important strands of Lochnerian jurisprudence, and was structured in a way that in turn facilitated subsequent incorporation of criminal procedure protections. Finally, it notes that in its critical beginning moments, incorporation decisions did not consider, much less adjudicate, the kinds of issues that are today central to discussions of judicial federalism
Long-standing disagreements over the meaning of property as a matter of legal theory present a sp... more Long-standing disagreements over the meaning of property as a matter of legal theory present a special problem in constitutional la. The Due Process and Takings Clauses set forth individual rights that can only be asserted if “property” is at stake. Yet the leading cases interpreting constitutional property doctrines have never managed to articulate a coherent general view of property and in some instances reach opposite conclusions about its meaning. Most notably, government benefits are considered “property” for purposes of due process but not takings doctrines, a conflict the cases acknowledge but do not attempt to explain. This Article offers a way to bring order to the confused treatment of property in constitutional law. It shows how a single definition of property can be adopted for all of the major constitutional property doctrines without the calamitous results that many seem to fear. It begins by arguing that property is best understood as the right to have some measure of...
Welcome to Episode 24 of the Eminent Domain Podcast. We have a great episode for you that we are ... more Welcome to Episode 24 of the Eminent Domain Podcast. We have a great episode for you that we are calling “A Review of Knick v. Township of Scott.” Our guest today is Professor James Stern of the William & Mary Law School. Professor Stern is uniquely qualified to talk about the Knick case as both a current property law professor and a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk
How should we allocate property rights in unowned tangible and intangible resources? This Article... more How should we allocate property rights in unowned tangible and intangible resources? This Article develops a model of original acquisition that draws together common law doctrines of first possession with original acquisition doctrines in patent, copyright, and trademark law. The common denominator is time: in each context, doctrine involves a trade-off between assigning entitlements to resources earlier or later in the process of their development and use. Early awards risk granting exclusivity to parties who may not be capable of putting resources to their best use. Late awards prolong contests for ownership, which may generate waste or discourage acquisition efforts in the first place. While the doctrinal resolution of these timing questions varies in different resource contexts, the determination depends upon a recurring and discrete set of functional considerations. This Article applies its theory to assess a host of doctrinal features in our patent, copyright, and trademark la...
This short commentary for the Global Competition Review looks at conflict-of-laws questions conce... more This short commentary for the Global Competition Review looks at conflict-of-laws questions concerning the availability of “indirect purchaser” suits under state antitrust laws. Using “comparative impairment” analysis, recent decisions have drawn implausible distinctions between seemingly identical cases on the basis of suppositions about how strongly attached different states are to their respective laws. A better approach would be to mold conflict-of-laws rules to enhance parties’ jurisdictional choice. Comparative impairment was the brainchild of antitrust giant William Baxter, and it seems an appropriate context to consider the effect different conflicts rules will have on the “market for law.”
For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searc... more For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searches” under the Fourth Amendment. As others have recognized, that doctrine is subjective, unpredictable, and conceptually confused, but viable alternatives have been slow to emerge. This Article supplies one.We argue that Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in background positive law. The touchstone of the search-and-seizure analysis should be whether government officials have done something forbidden to private parties. It is those actions that should be subjected to Fourth Amendment reasonableness review and the presumptive requirement to obtain a warrant. In short, Fourth Amendment protection should depend on property law, privacy torts, consumer laws, eavesdropping and wiretapping legislation, anti-stalking statutes, and other provisions of law generally applicable to private actors, rather than a freestanding doctrine of privacy fashioned by courts on the fly. This approac...
Property has always been treated somewhat exceptionally in the realm of conflict of laws, but tod... more Property has always been treated somewhat exceptionally in the realm of conflict of laws, but today conflicts rules for property are more unusual than ever — not because they have changed, but because they haven’t. Decades ago, most states discarded the general body of traditional conflict-of-laws doctrines, a transformation referred to as the Conflicts Revolution. Property, however, remains mysteriously untouched. The basic common-law principle is that property is governed by the law of its location — the situs rule. Despite persistent academic criticism, the situs rule is still followed in every state.This article argues certain structural features of property support the situs rule, notwithstanding the Conflicts Revolution. Theorists have increasingly stressed property’s “in rem” quality — the idea that property is “good against the world.” This article shows how that feature creates a special need for uniform treatment across jurisdictions, such that a single, exclusive source o...
This article examines a characteristic of property entitlements that is fundamental to the struct... more This article examines a characteristic of property entitlements that is fundamental to the structure of property systems that has received scant academic attention, a characteristic referred to as the mutual exclusivity principle. According to this principle, a property system does not allow for the existence of incompatible rights. Two people cannot separately be the owners of the same resource, for instance. By contrast, two people can each hold valid but contradictory contract rights to the resource. Although the existing property literature has stressed the " exclusive " nature of property, the various ways in which property is imagined to be exclusive, such as by conferring " rights to exclude, " fail to capture the essence of property as a distinct legal institution. Unlike these alternative conceptions of exclusiveness, the mutual exclusivity principle holds true across the range of different types of property entitlements, including not just fee simple ownership but also security interests and servitudes, and across the range of assets subject to property law, including not just land and physical objects but also intangibles like intellectual property and corporate shares.
Recognizing the role of the mutual exclusivity principle yields a number of practical insights. It helps explain various institutional features of property law, such as the system of future interests, the use of possession-based rules, the role of recording systems, and the negative, thing-based structure of property entitlements. It illuminates connections between property and other fields like corporations law and it calls into question aspects of existing doctrine, such as the preferred status of exclusion rights under the U.S. Constitution's Takings Clause. It also modifies the influential theory that property law is heavily shaped by problems of high information costs: while existing accounts seem to suppose that property law entails relatively high information costs because it imposes a relatively broad set of duties on others, many of the information cost problems identified in the literature actually result from the mutual exclusivity problem, rather than from the breadth of property duties.
At a more general level, understanding the centrality of the mutual exclusivity principle suggests some change in direction is called for within the wider property literature. American property scholarship has been preoccupied with questions about the scope and strength of property rights, overlooking the separate problem of ascertaining who happens to hold a given right, a problem distinctive to property law. Property, this article argues, is at least as much about title chains, patent searches, and creditor priorities as it is about trespass, remedies, and
eminent domain.
For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searc... more For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searches” under the Fourth Amendment. As others have recognized, that doctrine is subjective, unpredictable, and conceptually confused, but viable alternatives have been slow to emerge. This Article supplies one. We argue that Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in background positive law. The touchstone of the search-and-seizure analysis should be whether government officials have done something forbidden to private parties. It is those actions that should be subjected to Fourth Amendment reasonableness review and the presumptive requirement to obtain a warrant. In short, Fourth Amendment protection should depend on property law, privacy torts, consumer laws, eavesdropping and wiretapping legislation, anti-stalking statutes, and other provisions of law generally applicable to private actors, rather than a freestanding doctrine of privacy fashioned by courts on the fly.
This approach rests on multiple grounds. It is consistent with the history of the Fourth Amendment and with the structure of protection in the closely related area of constitutional property. It draws upon fundamental principles of liberal constitutionalism, namely a concern about abuse of official power. And it is superior to current privacy-based doctrine in many practical ways: it is clearer, more predictable, more accommodating of variation in different times and places, and more sensitive to the institutional strengths of legislative bodies, particularly when it comes to issues presented by new technologies. It also has significant doctrinal implications. Of most immediate importance, it provides a framework to analyze third-party problems — situations in which information about one person is obtained from another — that is more coherent and more attractive than the modern third-party doctrine. It also provides a new framework for many other contested Fourth Amendment questions, from abandoned property and DNA to the use of drones.
In this episode, James Y. Stern, Associate Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, discuss... more In this episode, James Y. Stern, Associate Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, discusses his article Intellectual Property & the Myth of Nonrivalry. Stern begins by describing the conventional economic theory of property and public goods, and how it structures the prevailing view of intellectual property among legal scholars in the United States. Specifically most scholars assume that property conventionally allocates scarce or rival resources, but because information is non-rival, allocation is unnecessary, and the only legitimate goal is providing an incentive for production. He argues that information actually is rival, because different people have different preferences for how it is used. Accordingly, public goods economics cannot provide an empirical justification for intellectual property, which is fundamentally an expression of normative values
This Article examines a characteristic of property entitlements fundamental to the structure of p... more This Article examines a characteristic of property entitlements fundamental to the structure of property systems that has received scant academic attention, a characteristic referred to as the mutual exclusivity principle. According to this principle, a property system does not allow for the existence of incompatible rights. Two people cannot separately be the owners of the same resource, for instance. By contrast, two people can each hold valid but contradictory contract rights to the resource. Although the existing property literature has stressed the “exclusive” nature of property, the various ways in which property is imagined to be exclusive, such as by conferring “rights to exclude,” fail to capture the essence of property as a distinct legal institution. Unlike these alternative conceptions of exclusiveness, the mutual exclusivity principle holds true across the range of different types of property entitlements, including not just fee simple ownership but also security intere...
The 20th century emergence of the incorporation doctrine is regarded as a critical development in... more The 20th century emergence of the incorporation doctrine is regarded as a critical development in constitutional law, but while issues related to the doctrine\u27s justification have been studied and debated for more than fifty years, the causes and mechanics of its advent have received relatively little academic attention. This Essay, part of a symposium on Judge Jeffrey Sutton\u27s recent book about state constitutional law, examines the doctrinal origins of incorporation, in an effort to help uncover why the incorporation doctrine emerged when it did and the way it did. It concludes that, for these purposes, incorporation is best understood as having three basic components, of which First Amendment incorporation predominated. It goes on to show how First Amendment incorporation drew in important ways from existing doctrine, including important strands of Lochnerian jurisprudence, and was structured in a way that in turn facilitated subsequent incorporation of criminal procedure protections. Finally, it notes that in its critical beginning moments, incorporation decisions did not consider, much less adjudicate, the kinds of issues that are today central to discussions of judicial federalism
Long-standing disagreements over the meaning of property as a matter of legal theory present a sp... more Long-standing disagreements over the meaning of property as a matter of legal theory present a special problem in constitutional la. The Due Process and Takings Clauses set forth individual rights that can only be asserted if “property” is at stake. Yet the leading cases interpreting constitutional property doctrines have never managed to articulate a coherent general view of property and in some instances reach opposite conclusions about its meaning. Most notably, government benefits are considered “property” for purposes of due process but not takings doctrines, a conflict the cases acknowledge but do not attempt to explain. This Article offers a way to bring order to the confused treatment of property in constitutional law. It shows how a single definition of property can be adopted for all of the major constitutional property doctrines without the calamitous results that many seem to fear. It begins by arguing that property is best understood as the right to have some measure of...
Welcome to Episode 24 of the Eminent Domain Podcast. We have a great episode for you that we are ... more Welcome to Episode 24 of the Eminent Domain Podcast. We have a great episode for you that we are calling “A Review of Knick v. Township of Scott.” Our guest today is Professor James Stern of the William & Mary Law School. Professor Stern is uniquely qualified to talk about the Knick case as both a current property law professor and a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk
How should we allocate property rights in unowned tangible and intangible resources? This Article... more How should we allocate property rights in unowned tangible and intangible resources? This Article develops a model of original acquisition that draws together common law doctrines of first possession with original acquisition doctrines in patent, copyright, and trademark law. The common denominator is time: in each context, doctrine involves a trade-off between assigning entitlements to resources earlier or later in the process of their development and use. Early awards risk granting exclusivity to parties who may not be capable of putting resources to their best use. Late awards prolong contests for ownership, which may generate waste or discourage acquisition efforts in the first place. While the doctrinal resolution of these timing questions varies in different resource contexts, the determination depends upon a recurring and discrete set of functional considerations. This Article applies its theory to assess a host of doctrinal features in our patent, copyright, and trademark la...
This short commentary for the Global Competition Review looks at conflict-of-laws questions conce... more This short commentary for the Global Competition Review looks at conflict-of-laws questions concerning the availability of “indirect purchaser” suits under state antitrust laws. Using “comparative impairment” analysis, recent decisions have drawn implausible distinctions between seemingly identical cases on the basis of suppositions about how strongly attached different states are to their respective laws. A better approach would be to mold conflict-of-laws rules to enhance parties’ jurisdictional choice. Comparative impairment was the brainchild of antitrust giant William Baxter, and it seems an appropriate context to consider the effect different conflicts rules will have on the “market for law.”
For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searc... more For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searches” under the Fourth Amendment. As others have recognized, that doctrine is subjective, unpredictable, and conceptually confused, but viable alternatives have been slow to emerge. This Article supplies one.We argue that Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in background positive law. The touchstone of the search-and-seizure analysis should be whether government officials have done something forbidden to private parties. It is those actions that should be subjected to Fourth Amendment reasonableness review and the presumptive requirement to obtain a warrant. In short, Fourth Amendment protection should depend on property law, privacy torts, consumer laws, eavesdropping and wiretapping legislation, anti-stalking statutes, and other provisions of law generally applicable to private actors, rather than a freestanding doctrine of privacy fashioned by courts on the fly. This approac...
Property has always been treated somewhat exceptionally in the realm of conflict of laws, but tod... more Property has always been treated somewhat exceptionally in the realm of conflict of laws, but today conflicts rules for property are more unusual than ever — not because they have changed, but because they haven’t. Decades ago, most states discarded the general body of traditional conflict-of-laws doctrines, a transformation referred to as the Conflicts Revolution. Property, however, remains mysteriously untouched. The basic common-law principle is that property is governed by the law of its location — the situs rule. Despite persistent academic criticism, the situs rule is still followed in every state.This article argues certain structural features of property support the situs rule, notwithstanding the Conflicts Revolution. Theorists have increasingly stressed property’s “in rem” quality — the idea that property is “good against the world.” This article shows how that feature creates a special need for uniform treatment across jurisdictions, such that a single, exclusive source o...
This article examines a characteristic of property entitlements that is fundamental to the struct... more This article examines a characteristic of property entitlements that is fundamental to the structure of property systems that has received scant academic attention, a characteristic referred to as the mutual exclusivity principle. According to this principle, a property system does not allow for the existence of incompatible rights. Two people cannot separately be the owners of the same resource, for instance. By contrast, two people can each hold valid but contradictory contract rights to the resource. Although the existing property literature has stressed the " exclusive " nature of property, the various ways in which property is imagined to be exclusive, such as by conferring " rights to exclude, " fail to capture the essence of property as a distinct legal institution. Unlike these alternative conceptions of exclusiveness, the mutual exclusivity principle holds true across the range of different types of property entitlements, including not just fee simple ownership but also security interests and servitudes, and across the range of assets subject to property law, including not just land and physical objects but also intangibles like intellectual property and corporate shares.
Recognizing the role of the mutual exclusivity principle yields a number of practical insights. It helps explain various institutional features of property law, such as the system of future interests, the use of possession-based rules, the role of recording systems, and the negative, thing-based structure of property entitlements. It illuminates connections between property and other fields like corporations law and it calls into question aspects of existing doctrine, such as the preferred status of exclusion rights under the U.S. Constitution's Takings Clause. It also modifies the influential theory that property law is heavily shaped by problems of high information costs: while existing accounts seem to suppose that property law entails relatively high information costs because it imposes a relatively broad set of duties on others, many of the information cost problems identified in the literature actually result from the mutual exclusivity problem, rather than from the breadth of property duties.
At a more general level, understanding the centrality of the mutual exclusivity principle suggests some change in direction is called for within the wider property literature. American property scholarship has been preoccupied with questions about the scope and strength of property rights, overlooking the separate problem of ascertaining who happens to hold a given right, a problem distinctive to property law. Property, this article argues, is at least as much about title chains, patent searches, and creditor priorities as it is about trespass, remedies, and
eminent domain.
For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searc... more For fifty years, courts have used a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard to define “searches” under the Fourth Amendment. As others have recognized, that doctrine is subjective, unpredictable, and conceptually confused, but viable alternatives have been slow to emerge. This Article supplies one. We argue that Fourth Amendment protection should be anchored in background positive law. The touchstone of the search-and-seizure analysis should be whether government officials have done something forbidden to private parties. It is those actions that should be subjected to Fourth Amendment reasonableness review and the presumptive requirement to obtain a warrant. In short, Fourth Amendment protection should depend on property law, privacy torts, consumer laws, eavesdropping and wiretapping legislation, anti-stalking statutes, and other provisions of law generally applicable to private actors, rather than a freestanding doctrine of privacy fashioned by courts on the fly.
This approach rests on multiple grounds. It is consistent with the history of the Fourth Amendment and with the structure of protection in the closely related area of constitutional property. It draws upon fundamental principles of liberal constitutionalism, namely a concern about abuse of official power. And it is superior to current privacy-based doctrine in many practical ways: it is clearer, more predictable, more accommodating of variation in different times and places, and more sensitive to the institutional strengths of legislative bodies, particularly when it comes to issues presented by new technologies. It also has significant doctrinal implications. Of most immediate importance, it provides a framework to analyze third-party problems — situations in which information about one person is obtained from another — that is more coherent and more attractive than the modern third-party doctrine. It also provides a new framework for many other contested Fourth Amendment questions, from abandoned property and DNA to the use of drones.
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Papers by James Y Stern
Recognizing the role of the mutual exclusivity principle yields a number of practical insights. It helps explain various institutional features of property law, such as the system of future interests, the use of possession-based rules, the role of recording systems, and the negative, thing-based structure of property entitlements. It illuminates connections between property and other fields like corporations law and it calls into question aspects of existing doctrine, such as the preferred status of exclusion rights under the U.S. Constitution's Takings Clause. It also modifies the influential theory that property law is heavily shaped by problems of high information costs: while existing accounts seem to suppose that property law entails relatively high information costs because it imposes a relatively broad set of duties on others, many of the information cost problems identified in the literature actually result from the mutual exclusivity problem, rather than from the breadth of property duties.
At a more general level, understanding the centrality of the mutual exclusivity principle suggests some change in direction is called for within the wider property literature. American property scholarship has been preoccupied with questions about the scope and strength of property rights, overlooking the separate problem of ascertaining who happens to hold a given right, a problem distinctive to property law. Property, this article argues, is at least as much about title chains, patent searches, and creditor priorities as it is about trespass, remedies, and
eminent domain.
This approach rests on multiple grounds. It is consistent with the history of the Fourth Amendment and with the structure of protection in the closely related area of constitutional property. It draws upon fundamental principles of liberal constitutionalism, namely a concern about abuse of official power. And it is superior to current privacy-based doctrine in many practical ways: it is clearer, more predictable, more accommodating of variation in different times and places, and more sensitive to the institutional strengths of legislative bodies, particularly when it comes to issues presented by new technologies. It also has significant doctrinal implications. Of most immediate importance, it provides a framework to analyze third-party problems — situations in which information about one person is obtained from another — that is more coherent and more attractive than the modern third-party doctrine. It also provides a new framework for many other contested Fourth Amendment questions, from abandoned property and DNA to the use of drones.
Recognizing the role of the mutual exclusivity principle yields a number of practical insights. It helps explain various institutional features of property law, such as the system of future interests, the use of possession-based rules, the role of recording systems, and the negative, thing-based structure of property entitlements. It illuminates connections between property and other fields like corporations law and it calls into question aspects of existing doctrine, such as the preferred status of exclusion rights under the U.S. Constitution's Takings Clause. It also modifies the influential theory that property law is heavily shaped by problems of high information costs: while existing accounts seem to suppose that property law entails relatively high information costs because it imposes a relatively broad set of duties on others, many of the information cost problems identified in the literature actually result from the mutual exclusivity problem, rather than from the breadth of property duties.
At a more general level, understanding the centrality of the mutual exclusivity principle suggests some change in direction is called for within the wider property literature. American property scholarship has been preoccupied with questions about the scope and strength of property rights, overlooking the separate problem of ascertaining who happens to hold a given right, a problem distinctive to property law. Property, this article argues, is at least as much about title chains, patent searches, and creditor priorities as it is about trespass, remedies, and
eminent domain.
This approach rests on multiple grounds. It is consistent with the history of the Fourth Amendment and with the structure of protection in the closely related area of constitutional property. It draws upon fundamental principles of liberal constitutionalism, namely a concern about abuse of official power. And it is superior to current privacy-based doctrine in many practical ways: it is clearer, more predictable, more accommodating of variation in different times and places, and more sensitive to the institutional strengths of legislative bodies, particularly when it comes to issues presented by new technologies. It also has significant doctrinal implications. Of most immediate importance, it provides a framework to analyze third-party problems — situations in which information about one person is obtained from another — that is more coherent and more attractive than the modern third-party doctrine. It also provides a new framework for many other contested Fourth Amendment questions, from abandoned property and DNA to the use of drones.