•  20
    James Penner has probably done more than anyone else in legal philosophy to set the terms of debate in property theory for the past two decades. His 1997 book, The Idea of Property in Law initiated...
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    A Humean Theory of Property Rights
    Dissertation, University of Michigan. 2015.
    My dissertation defends a Humean theory of property rights against its neo-Lockean and ‘resource egalitarian’ rivals. Humean property rights are conventional and not grounded in pre-institutional moral entitlements. Nevertheless, the importance of property rights for facilitating social cooperation between people with differing views about justice gives them normative authority even when they do not conform to ideal principles of distributive justice or ‘natural right.’ I develop a conceptual ar…Read more
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    A defense of Humean property theory
    Legal Theory 1-34. forthcoming.
    ABSTRACT Two rival approaches to property rights dominate contemporary political philosophy: Lockean natural rights and egalitarian theories of distributive justice. This article defends a third approach, which can be traced to the work of David Hume. Unlike Lockean rights, Humean property rights are not grounded in pre-institutional moral entitlements. In contrast to the egalitarian approach, which begins with highly abstract principles of distributive justice, Humean theory starts with simple …Read more