Property Values and Institutions

Property law and property theory have become a thriving industry in the legal academy rendering some exciting conceptual and normative challenges. In Property: Values and Institutions , Hanoch Dagan covers numerous property issues to provide a liberal theory of property. He analyzes the interactions between landowners and governments (both eminent domain and regulatory takings) and those regulating the governance of property owned by multiple individuals (such as co-ownership, marital property, and the law of common interest communities). Two additional features of this book are the emphasis on groups and the attempt to look at property law from a broad institutional perspective to show that property law serves as the foundation for the organization of various types of groups and communities. For legal realists, the three parts analyzed in this book, Property, State, and Community are not viewed as separate and distinct but inter-connected. It views property as an important legal regime intended to protect important individualistic values such as autonomy, personhood, and desert, and a shield for private individuals against the power of both the state and the community. It also views property as a major instrument in the pursuit of other worthy goals of the liberal state, such as aggregate welfare, social responsibility, and distributive justice.

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.