Assembly and Division
Assembly and Division
This chapter examines the assembly and division of property entitlements. It starts with eminent domain, a forcible land assembly mechanism that has been employed to avoid holdout or “anticommons” problems, but has also produced outrage, as seen following the 2005 Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London. Similar controversies arise in intellectual property contexts, as where patent licenses must be assembled. The law must determine whether the initial rights-holder will be protected against an involuntary transfer (property rule protection), or whether she can be forced to relinquish her claim upon compensation (a liability rule solution). The chapter also examines settings where co-owned land or other assets must be split up among claimants, as through judicial partition. These two types of problems—assembly and division—are not distinct, nor is one inherently harder to solve than the other. Instead, they share a common structure: each requires both assembly (of consent by the affected stakeholders, or an overriding of their lack of consent) and division (of the surplus that is thereby created). After examining factors that influence the difficulty of reconfiguration efforts, the chapter weighs various approaches, including explicit options, to address configuration challenges.
Keywords: land assembly, eminent domain, holdout, anticommons, Kelo, property rule, liability rule, partition, patents, options
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
