Property as the Law of Things… : DASH Story 2016-07-08
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I am a retired attorney whose former practice included a significant amount of international litigation and arbitration. I just received a telephone call from the daughter of a family friend who recently graduated from law school and is presently representing an elderly client pro bono in an action involving real property in a civil law nation. She was perplexed as to why, as a native bilingual speaker of the foreign language, she still found it impossible to ascertain from the foreign laws the nature of her client's rights/interests in said property under the foreign law, describing her conversations with foreign counsel on the matter as "speaking past each other." The problem, not surprisingly, lay in her assumption that there existed some objective, universal definition of "property rights." Smith's masterful article on Property as the Law of Things revealed the nature of her fallacy far batter than any explanation of mine ever could.
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US