Taking Property Seriously

Professor Freyfogle steps back to assess property in its role as a basic social institution and tool to promote the common good. From this perspective, he shows how as the needs and priorities of society change over time, so too do property rights need to change to retain their legitimacy and usefulness. This process of keeping property rights in step with shifts in what constitutes the common good is largely a matter of having good political arrangements in place to calibrate and recalibrate private rights over time. Accordingly, he argues that a key task for sustainability is to devise new forms of governance that produce better decisions about adjusting property rights and that are informed by a wellarticulated vision of what it means to have ecologically sound land uses.