This Essay will trace the decline of the conception of property in Anglo-American thought, and the rise of the view among modern legal economists that property is simply a list of use rights in particular resources. As is the case with law and economics more generally, this view of property finds its roots in Ronald Coase’s seminal article, The Problem of Social Cost. Coase implied that property has no function other than to serve as the baseline for contracting or for collectively imposing use rights in resources, and he modeled conflicts over the use of resources exclusively in terms of bipolar disputes between A and B. Wittingly or not, this gave rise to a conception of property as a cluster of in personam rights and hastened the demise of the in rem conception of property.
