Defending coase against false charges: A comment on block

This note suggests that Coase's The Problem of Social Cost has been read and interpreted too broadly to apply to all aspects of law. Drawing from Coase's own work, I show that Coase was narrowly focused on the economic analysis of negative externalities. This understanding of the paper precludes it from being used as a justification for the broad redistribution of property rights for the purpose of wealth maximization. This understanding of Coase's paper also defends his work against charges from those who object to making the determination of property rights secondary to the maximization of wealth.     

虚拟财产权的经济分析

在我国财产权法制条件下,有必要从经济学的角度探讨虚拟财产权概念界定的可行性和价值性,分析虚拟财产的利用形式以及如何发挥其最大的经济效益。产权分析方法有利于虚拟财产权体系构建,使虚拟财产制度设计凸现其合理性,以确保虚拟财产的法律规制,维护正常的虚拟财产交易安全。     

财产征收的宪法界限

财产权是一项重要的宪法权利,同时也是其他权利行使的基础。围绕财产权的宪法保障制度,对财产征收的法律基础、立法的内容形成功能与财产征收的界限以及经济规制与财产征收的界限做一学理的分析,具有重要的理论与实践意义。     

非公经济产权之刑法保护:缺陷与改进

随着社会主义市场经济的不断发展与完善,全面而自由的市场竞争机制已成为社会经济发展的重要动力。然而,由于我国经济体制的特殊性,市场经济取代计划经济后,相应的法律制度并未随之修正,立法与司法对非公有制经济仍存在歧视性对待。司法实践中对非公经济财产处置乱象的问题仍然存在,并严重威胁非公经济主体的持续经营。从产权保护理论来讲,平等保护各经济主体的财产权利是消除"制度壁垒"的有效方式,应建立平等的犯罪构成要件以及合理的刑罚结构,明确界定涉案财物的范围,提升对非公有制财产权利的保护力度。规范司法工作人员的办案程序,依照法律规定的权限、程序处置涉案财物并建立相应的权利人申诉与救济措施,将平等保护原则贯穿于法律制定、实施的整个过程中,切实保障非公有制经济的合法产权,才能使社会主义经济良性发展。     

The Loss of Property Rights and the Construction of Legal Consciousness in Early Socialist Romania (1950–1965)

What happens to legal and rights consciousness when rights previously protected are taken away? In this article, I investigate the process of contesting urban housing nationalization in Romania in the early 1950s in order to understand how the loss of property rights led to new hybrid types of legal consciousness. I find that the construction of socialist legal consciousness was grounded in the interaction between the legally constituted selves of former owners and state bureaucrats who drew from distinct legal and property rights ideologies. This process underscores continuities in legal consciousness even under drastic regime changes, which in turn has implications for the construction of new hegemonic legalities and power regimes. The article is based on extensive document and archival research.     

Regime Change and Property Rights Consciousness in Postcommunist Romania

This article analyzes rights consciousness as distinct from legal consciousness, and uses the post‐1989 housing restitution in Romania to study property rights consciousness as a type of rights consciousness. I argue that property rights consciousness is only partially an outcome of state power and the political regime, and that rights consciousness more generally must be explicitly analyzed beyond formal rights, legal mobilization, and litigation. I explore sources of rights consciousness for former owners and their heirs, state tenants, and lawyers. Sources of rights consciousness include state policies under distinct property regimes, value systems and ideologies, history, identity, practices, supranational actors, and expectations of what rights can deliver. I find clear distinctions between legal and rights consciousness, as well as variations between and within the groups. The article is based on extensive archival research, interviews conducted in the city of Timi?oara, Romania, textbooks, academic articles, and court decisions pre‐ and post‐1989.     

Radical Transactionalism: Legal Consciousness,Diverse Economies,and the Sharing Economy

This article proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community‐level action for sustainability, focusing on its troubled relationship to the sharing economy. Through a conversation between scholarship on legal consciousness and diverse economies, it shows how struggles over transactional legality are a neglected site of activism for sustainability. Recognizing the diversity of economic life and forms of law illuminates what we call ‘radical transactionalism': the creative redeployment of legal techniques and practices relating to risk management, organizational form, and the allocation of contractual and property rights in order to further the purpose of internalizing social and ecological values into the heart of economic exchange. By viewing sharing‐economy initiatives ‘beyond Airbnb and Uber’ as sites of radical transactionalism, legal building blocks of property and capital can be reimagined and reconfigured, helping to construct a shared infrastructure for the exercise of collective agency in response to disadvantage sustained by law.     

Losers: Recovering Lost Property in Japan and the United States

This article examines the lost property regime of Japan, which has one of the most impressive reputations in the world for returning lost property to its rightful owner, and compares it with that of the United States. Folk legend attributes Japanese lost-and-found success to honesty and other-regarding preferences. In this article, I focus on another possible explanation: legal institutions that efficiently and predictably allocate and enforce possessory rights. These recognized, centuries-old rules mesh with norms, institutional structures, and economic incentives to reinforce mutually the message that each sends and yields more lost-property recovery than altruism alone.     

The Commons as a Legal Concept

Scientific debates about the political, economic and even legal aspects of commons have circulated wherever commons are perceived to pose a challenge to the increasing commodification of people’s lives. Indeed, a wide range of commons has emerged worldwide. Emerging commons pose a challenge to the law which is now requested to provide legal tools to resist the dispossession of the common wealth. Nevertheless, commons do not embody a reality which is external or unfamiliar to the law. This paper is an attempt to reframe the commons as a legal concept. In this article I argue that commons are not just a marginal element of contemporary legal systems. Rather, they embody the premises for important transformative practices and discourses and represent a subversive site in the legal order. I maintain, first, that the law of the commons is consistent with the law in force and the current legal regimes of private property and, second, that the current stage of globalization is most favourable to the establishment of a law of the commons both in the peripheries and at the core of the capitalist system. However, given the persistent dominance of the individual-based property paradigm, the legitimacy of the commons on legal grounds remains problematic. Certainly the recognition and protection of the commons challenge the legal regime of property in force and query about the possible limits that the law may impose upon property rights. It is evident that the true core of the commons discourse as a legal discourse rests upon its relation with property and depends on the notion of property that we assume as normative. The Hohfeldian idea of property as a bundle of rights offers a good starting point for articulating a legal theory of the commons under positive law.     

知识产权的海关保护法律制度及完善

知识产权海关保护是用行政手段对知识产权侵权产品的跨国交易进行规制,目的在于将侵权货物阻止在海关边境外,不让其进入一国或一单独关税区的商业流通,以免破坏正常的经济贸易秩序。我国已建立起相对完备的知识产权海关保护法律制度,但在具体制度方面存在不合理的方面,不利于保护相关权利人的利益。本文分析了我国知识产权海关保护法律制度的现状,对其不足进行探析,并提出了相应的法律完善措施。     

知识产权客体问题的澄清

21世纪是知识经济的时代,知识产权将成为主导型的权利形态。如何更好地保护知识产权,就必须对知识产权的客体等颇多争议的问题加以澄清。本文分别从权利以及法律关系的角度契入,详细地论述了作为知识产权权利客体的知识产品和作为知识产权法律关系客体的各项权利,同时分析了知识产权下权利客体与法律关系客体不相一致的成因。     

The Symbiosis of Property and English Environmental Law – Property Rights in a Public Law Context

This article argues that environmental regimes entailing considerable administrative discretion are now serving to contextualise and partly to constitute property rights in English law. In particular, rights to use land are ‘democratised’ to varying degrees through the administration of environmental regulation, and are adapted to land‐use problems on an evolving basis. In return, property rights affect environmental regulation, through legal protections for property interests, although the nature of the discretion exercised within environmental regimes seems to determine the kind and extent of this symbiotic influence. As a result, environmental law challenges property scholars to reflect on the impact of administrative decision‐making on property rights, conceptually, doctrinally and in terms of its legitimacy. At the same time, environmental lawyers need to take seriously the nature and legal treatment of property rights in the application and analysis of modern environmental law.     

财富、财产权与宪法

从现代宪法的发生学视角出发,通过梳理财产权从古代到现代的两条转化路径,即自然权利路径和普通法路径,阐述了作为现代宪制动力机制的财富和财产权问题,揭示了财富与财产权的认识论和法律观的古今之变,进而论证了财产权是现代宪法的基石,对财产权的保护是现代宪法的核心原则之一。     

The Dynamics of Enduring Property Relationships in Land

This article proposes a new way of looking at property relationships that will enrich our understanding of how they operate. It focuses on property rights in land which are consensual in origin, although this approach could usefully be applied both to non‐consensual property relationships and to other property types. Recognising both the temporal and spatial dimensions of land, the dynamics approach reflects the fact that most property relationships are lived relationships, affected by changing patterns and understandings of spatial use, relationship needs, economic realities, opportunities, technical innovations, and so on. Although evolving responsively to accommodate changing uses and new rights‐holders, these relationships are nevertheless sustained and enduring. The dynamics lens acknowledges the diverse range of legal, regulatory, social and commercial norms that shape property relations. Our approach also explores how far the enduring, yet dynamic, nature of property relations is taken into account by a range of decision‐makers.     

Propertisation and Commercialisation: On Controlling the Uses of Human Biomaterials

Third parties, such as researchers and biotech companies, can and do legally acquire property rights in biomaterials. They are protected by the law of property in their use of these. Recent legal decisions have seen a move towards the tentative explicit recognition of some property rights in biomaterials vesting in the source of the materials. However, this recognition has not included income rights. This article discusses the interests that parties have in controlling the uses of biomaterials and the commercial interests that stem from those uses. The article argues that concerns regarding the allocation of property rights to the source generally elide property rights in biomaterials with the right to derive income from the transfer of those materials. Propertisation does not analytically entail commercialisation. It is therefore questionable whether it is reasonable to protect third parties' income rights, while excluding the source of the biomaterials from such protection.     

Trade marks plus? the role of trade marks in the global economy and the danger of over-protection

This article examines the economic role of the trade mark, both as a structuring device and as a means of adding value to products. It shows how its role as a flexible structuring device that provides a distinct focus for goodwill derives from the special meaning of the term “origin” or “trade origin” in trade mark law, this being what a trade mark is supposed to indicate. Firms can control the identity that a trade mark signifies and confers on the products with which it is used without being tied to any particular set of production arrangements. This article also considers how goodwill can be a source of economic benefit both through reducing transaction costs and, in some cases, through adding value to products. This article then examines the economic rationale for the legal protection of trade marks and shows how this is analogous to the rationale for awarding property rights over tangible resources and different from that for other forms of intellectual property right. The pressure to expand the legal protection of stronger trade marks is explored and it is accepted that there is an economic case for doing so. However, it is argued that the additional protection must be carefully calibrated through definitions that take account of its economic rationale and avoid the danger of over-extending it. In particular, this danger of over-protection arises from making a false analogy between stronger trade marks and the kind of intangible output that is the subject of the other forms of intellectual property right.     

知识产权出资主体的适格性研究

知识产权在知识经济中的重要地位,决定知识产权资本化将成为21世纪一种格外引人瞩目的法律和经济现象.为保证知识产权资本运营安全,至少应当从知识产权出资主体的适格性考察和知识产权出资主体的法律承诺两个角度,来探索公司接受知识产权出资风险的法律防范措施.     

Genes and Spleens: Property, Contract, or Privacy Rights in the Human Body?

This article compares three frameworks for legal regulation of the human body. Property law systematically favors those who use the body to create commercial products. Yet contract and privacy rights cannot compete with the property paradigm, which alone affords a complete bundle of rights enforceable against the whole world. In the face of researchers' property rights, the theoretical freedom to contract and the meager interest in privacy leave those who supply body parts vulnerable to exploitation.     

维权与控权:经济法的本质及功能定位——对“需要干预说”的理论评析

经济法的功能在于维护市场公平竞争秩序,维护市场主体的财产所有权、平等竞争权和自由交易权,维护消费者和弱势群体的合法权益,维护社会公共利益和社会经济的可持续发展。为达致上述目的,经济法需要授权政府相关职能部门担负起监管市场主体行为、维护市场运行秩序的职责。而为防止政府公权力的可能被滥用,经济法更是以法律手段将政府部门及其工作人员的市场监管行政行为严格限定在法律授权及法定程序的范围内,强调公权力行使的责任性、义务性和透明度,做到严格依法办事。那种从“市场失灵说”出发主张政府对经济“需要干预说”的经济法理论,是对现代经济法本质和政府功能定位的极大误解,它在理论上是难以自证其说的,在实践中也是极为有害的。