Oliver Oldman

More from this Issue

• Civil Rights Article

  Intimate Discrimination: The State’s Role in the Accidents of Sex and Love

  Vol. 122 No. 5 April 2009 This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state’s role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination – through official policies such as segregation – to prohibiting discrimination – through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of discrimination persists, often in forms that are hard to regulate or even to recognize.

  • Elizabeth F. Emens
• Property Article

  Adjusting Alienability

  Vol. 122 No. 5 April 2009 In recent years, the right to exclude has dominated property theory, relegating alienability – another of the standard incidents of ownership – to the scholarly shadows. Law and economics has also long neglected inalienability, despite its inclusion in Calabresi and Melamed’s Cathedral. In this Article, I explore inalienability rules as tools for achieving efficiency or other ends when applied to resources that society generally views as appropriate objects of market transactions. Specifically, I focus on inalienability's capacity to alter upstream decisions by would-be resellers about whether to acquire an entitlement in the first place. By influencing these acquisition decisions, inalienability rules can buttress or substitute for other adjustments to the property bundle in addressing resource dilemmas. Of particular interest is the possibility that limits on alienability could sidestep the holdout problems that have often spurred resort to liability rules, and could do so without interfering as profoundly with the owner's autonomy interests. While alienability limits carry well-known disadvantages, they might be structured in ways that would minimize those drawbacks. Recognizing the full potential of alienability limits in addressing resource dilemmas requires applying the same level of creativity to devising inalienability rules as has previously been applied to the design of liability rules.

  • Lee Anne Fennell
• Election Law Note

  Political Gerrymandering 2000-2008: “A Self-Limiting Enterprise”?

  Vol. 122 No. 5 April 2009