Ostrom＊s Law: Property rights in the commons

作者：Lee Anne Fennell

来源：International Journal of the Commons, 2011, 5(1): 9.

DOI：10.18352/bmgn-lchr.252

• anticommons
• commons
• interdisciplinarity
• models
• scale
• semicommons

Elinor Ostrom%26apos;s work has immeasurably enhanced legal scholars%26apos; understanding of property. Although the richness of these contributions cannot be distilled into a single thesis, their flavor can be captured in a maxim I call Ostrom%26apos;s Law: A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory. Ostrom%26apos;s scholarship challenges the conventional wisdom by examining how people interact over resources on the ground - an approach that enables her to identify recurring institutional features associated with long-term success. In this essay, I trace some of the ways that Ostrom%26apos;s focus on situated examples has advanced interdisciplinary dialogue about property as a legal institution and as a human invention for solving practical problems. I begin by highlighting the attention to detail that characterizes Ostrom%26apos;s methodology. I then examine how Ostrom%26apos;s scholarship yields insights for, and employs insights from, property theory. Next, I consider the question of scale, an important focal point of Ostrom%26apos;s work, and one that carries profound implications for law. I conclude with some observations about interdisciplinarity as it relates to research on the commons.