Common Law, Duties, and Harms

Eric R. Claeys

doi:10.1017/9781108951395.019

12 - Common Law, Duties, and Harms

from Part IV - Property in Common Law and Public Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2025

Eric R. Claeys

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Eric R. Claeys: Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia

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Summary

This chapter studies how property rights are protected and recognized in common law. In doctrine, substantive rights are not recognized expressly but indirectly. Rights are recognized via doctrines that prohibit wrongs to rights. Common law protects rights in this manner for practical reasons. Courts are better equipped to enforce duties between rights-holders and aggressors than they are to work out the full scope of rights, and when the law prohibits wrongs to rights, it leaves to people the freedom to do whatever does not violate the prohibitions. To secure rights, however, legal duties and prohibitions are structured as seems likely to secure rights. This chapter illustrates nuisance and tort suits over train sparks. Both doctrines secure to owners and occupants rights to use land. The harm, interference, and unreasonability elements of nuisance are structured to secure use rights, and sparks doctrine rules out contributory negligence to secure the same use rights. This way of thinking about rights and wrongs goes against contemporary law and economic scholarship, and this chapter contrasts law and economic studies of rights with the approach developed in this chapter.

Keywords

nuisance train sparks tort causation harm duty unreasonability use right Coase law and economics

Type: Chapter
Information: Natural Property Rights , pp. 221 - 244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108951395.019 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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