Just posted in Scholarship@Cornell Law is “Unborn Communities,” a working paper by Gregory S. Alexander, A. Robert Noll Professor of Law at Cornell. From the abstract:
Do property owners owe obligations to members of future generations? Although the question can be reframed in rights-terms so that it faces rights-oriented theories of property, it seems to pose a greater challenge to those theories of property that directly focus on the obligations that property owners owe to others rather than (or, better, along with) the rights of owner. The challenge is compounded where such theories emphasize the relationships between individual property owners and the various communities to which they belong. Do those communities include members of future generations? This paper addresses these questions as they apply to a property theory that I have developed in recent work, a theory that we can call the human-flourishing theory of property.
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