Chang Yun-chien. Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses

Cambridge University Press, 2023. — 453 p. — ISBN 978-1-009-23659-1.The first book of its kind, Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses, uses a unique hand-coded data set on nearly 300 dimensions on the substance of property law in 156 jurisdictions to describe the convergence and divergence of key property doctrines around the world. This book quantitatively analyzes property institutions and uses machine learning methods to categorize jurisdictions into ten legal families, challenging the existing paradigms in economics and law. Using other cross-country data, the author empirically tests theories about property law and comparative law. Using economic efficiency as both a positive and a normative criterion, each chapter evaluates which jurisdictions have the most efficient property doctrines, concluding that the common law is not more efficient than the civil law. Unlike prior studies on empirical comparative law, this book provides detailed citations to laws in each jurisdiction. Data and documentation are publicly available on the author's website.Introduction
Foundation
Property Law around the World: An Empirical Overview
Economic Framework
Limited Number of Limited Property Rights: Less Is More
Transfer of Ownership: Transaction Cost versus Information Cost
Immovable Property
Acquisitive Prescription: Hardly Justified in Modern, Developed Countries
Building Encroachment: In Search of an Efficiency Justification
Co-Ownership Partition: Proposing a New Auction-Based Design
Managing Co-ownership: Tragedy of the Common-Ownership?
Access to Landlocked Land: Hybrid Entitlement Protection
Movable Property
Good-Faith Purchase: Proposing Fractional Ownership and Internal Auction
Finders, Keepers: A Minority Rule
Specificatio: Do What the Romans Did
Accessio and Confusio: No Sign of Convergence
Conclusion