Conference Paper

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/4

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Adverse Possession and Perpetuities Law: Two Dents in the Libertarian Model of Property Rights
(1986) Ellickson, Robert C.
"Richard Epstein adheres to what can fairly be called a 'libertarian model' of law. Although he occasionally implies that this model positively describes the law as it is, his is mainly a normative vision of what it should be. With great energy and courage, over the past dozen years he has used the model to assess, and often to condemn, prevailing legal doctrines in torts, contracts, labor law, and other fields. In his article 'Past and Future: The Temporal Dimension in the Law of Property' Epstein carries the libertarian mission into new territory, and analyzes a number of fundamental doctrines of property law that law-and-economics scholars have largely ignored. Although in this comment I am often critical of Epstein's analysis, I congratulate him for opening up these neglected topics to debate. I will first outline the libertarian model of law and contrast it with a utilitarian model. I will then analyze the adverse possession and perpetuities problems, and conclude that the venerable doctrines that govern these areas reveal a utilitarian theme in property law. I will conclude by contending that Epstein himself often lapses into utilitarianism, perhaps because the reality of transaction costs makes a purely libertarian model of property rights normatively untenable"
War, Revolution, and Two-level Games: A Simple Choice-Theoretic Model
(1992) Starr, Harvey; McGinnis, Michael D.
"We focus on the decision problem of a government (or regime) facing external and domestic threats to it s security. For simplicity, we treat this governmental actor as a unitary rational actor. We also assume that this government (which we denote as actor i) faces threats from a set of other unitary actors, comprised of other governments j-1,2,...,J and domestic organizations or groups k-1,2,...K. Since government i must fin d some way to balance the threats posed by these various actors, and since dealing with tradeoffs between desired ends is the very essence of rationality, a rational choice approach seems particularly appropriate for modeling a government's efforts to manage two-level security problems. We assume that government i is fundamentally concerned with minimizing the probability that it will lose a war with any government j or that it will be overthrown after a revolution instigated by domestic groups k."

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