The Decline of Property and Trust
The Decline of Property and Trust
This chapter charts the decline of property and trust in legal and economic thinking. It explains that the economic analysis of property does not consider property to be a coherent concept. Instead, property is treated as bilateral use rights between two parties. In law, property has declined significantly from its golden age in the eighteenth century. This is largely due to the changing nature of the economy and property's failure to adapt to changing circumstances. This chapter then shows how the traditional idea of property, based on the right to exclude, cannot adequately explain the trust and the beneficial interest. As a result of property's inability to explain trusts, the obligational and entity approaches have come to prominence.
Keywords: property, right to exclude, economic analysis of property, intangible property, Ronald Coase, Wesley Hohfeld
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .