Courses | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

Property is a central social institution whose legal definition poses fundamental questions about efficiency, fairness, the distribution of wealth, and the tension between public and private rights and interests. What can we own? What does it mean to own something? To what extent can government regulate or take away what we own? Anglo-American property law's answers to these questions developed mainly in the context of land. These same questions are posed today in the context of ownership of artistic and digital creations, of body parts, of cyberspace, and of one's earning capacity. We will examine these issues in both old and new settings.