Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Cornell Law Review

Abstract

Will property scholars be as open as economic policymakers have been recently to abandoning longstanding ideas and adopting a new intellectual perspective? Only time will tell what, if any, impact the dramatic events of recent months will have in legal academic circles. In this Response I pursue what I hope is a more fruitful question for academic inquiry, namely whether property scholars should follow Pefialver's recommendations and embrace virtue ethics as a normative guide. I start by critically analyzing Pefialver's objections to economic analysis of law. I then identify four questions that Pefialver and other proponents of using virtue ethics as a normative guide in making public policy will need to confront to advance their case. I am skeptical that virtue ethics offers an attractive or a feasible framework to guide land use or other forms of regulation at this stage. But I applaud Pefialver's effort to resurrect the ancient tradition of thinking about property as an instrument for promoting certain character traits. The idea of using property law to foster virtue raises many fascinating questions for modern property theorists and is well worth further analysis.

First Page

991

Volume

94

Publication Date

2009

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