Property As the Keystone Right?
ftlIpftt ~lInlIris ~sptclu1tt Property as the Keystone Right? Carol M. Rnse* The collapse of socialist regimes has revived an interest in property rights allover the world, as once-statist nations consider privatization as a route to commercial and economic revitalization.1 Even here in the prop erty-conscious United States, constitutional property rights have become a subject of renewed popular and political interest.2 But property rights have a somewhat uneasy place in a constitutional ordering. There are of course substantial libertarian arguments for prop erty rights as an element of personal autonomy,3 but on the whole, the post-socialist enthusiasm for property seems to have been overwhelmingly economic: the allure ofproperty is that it enhances wealth, both personal * Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization, Yale Law School. For many helpful comments I would especially like to thank Bruce Ackerman, jane Baron, jack Balkin, Fred Bosselman, Peter Byrne,james Krier, and Laura Underkuffler. I would also like to thank the participants in workshops at the Georgetown University Law School and Yale Law School, as well as the participants in the Fourth International Conference on Social justice in Trier, Germany, and the Conference of International Property Lawyers in Maastricht, The Netherlands. A very early foray into some ofthe thoughts expressed here appeared in my review ofJAMES W. ELY,jR., THE GUARDIAN OF EVERY OTHER RIGHT: A CoNSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF PROPER'IY RIGfrrs (1992), in 10 CONST. COMMENTARY 238 (1993). 1 Amy Chua, The Privatization-Nationalization Cycle: The Link Between Markets and Ethnicity in Develcping Countries, 95 CoLUM. L.
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