University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 2000 Savigny, Holmes, and the Law and Economics of Possession Richard A. Posner Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Richard A. Posner, "Savigny, Holmes, and the Law and Economics of Possession," 86 Virginia Law Review 535 (2000). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ESSAY SAVIGNY, HOLMES, AND THE LAW AND ECONOMICS OF POSSESSION RichardA. Posner* F RIEDRICH Carl von Savigny (1779-1862) was one of the most important figures in the history of legal thought, and through- out the nineteenth century enjoyed enormous international pres- tige. Today-in America at any rate-outside of a tiny subset of legal historians, he is barely a name.' It seems to me that we lose something when we forget our intellectual ancestors so thoroughly. I shall try to demonstrate this by approaching Savigny from the di- rection of Oliver Wendell Holmes's book The Common Law, which criticizes the influential theory of possession expounded in Savigny's 1803 book Das Recht des Besitzes and in doing so paves the way for a modern economic analysis of possession. I focus on Savigny's theory of possession, rather than on any of the other fields of law that he discussed, because it is the only part of Savi- gny's work that Holmes discusses other than in passing.