Property

Property: Values and Institutions, by Hanoch Dagan, offers an original understanding of property, different from the dominant voices in the field, yet loyal to the practice of property. It rejects the misleading dominant binarism in which property is either one monistic form, structured around Blackstone's (in)famous formula of sole and despotic dominion, or a formless bundle of rights. Instead, it conceptualizes property as an umbrella for a set of institutions bearing a mutual family resemblance. It resists the prevailing tendency to discuss property through the prism of only one particular value, notably efficiency. Dagan argues that property can, and should, serve a pluralistic set of liberal values. These property values include not only autonomy and utility, which are emphasized by many contemporary scholars, but also labor, personhood, community, and distributive justice.

Dagan claims that property law, at least at its best, tailors different configurations of entitlements to different property institutions, with each such institution designed to match the specific balance between property values best suited to its characteristic social setting. Dagan develops this theoretical account and applies it to key doctrinal contexts. In particular, he analyzes the normative underpinnings of the doctrines regulating the interactions between landowners and governments (both eminent domain and regulatory takings doctrines) and those regulating the governance of property owned by multiple owners (such as co-ownership, marital property, and the law of common interest communities).

Hanoch Dagan is the Dean of the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center of Advanced Legal Studies at TAU. He is also a member of the American Law Institute and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. Professor Dagan wrote Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values and The Law and Ethics of Restitution (both with Cambridge University Press) as well as numerous articles on property, restitution, and private law theory. His articles were published in leading legal journals such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, California Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and University of Toronto Law Journal.