One question looms large in the early history of Soviet legal theory and practice: how and why did EvgenyPashukanis emerge as the pre-eminent Soviet jurist from 1924 to 1930, come under only minor criticism from 1930 to 1936 and then be denounced and executed in 1937 as a ‘Trotskyite saboteur’? Of course, Pashukanis was not alone. Virtually every leading figure associated with the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union fell victim to Stalin’s purges by 1937 (from Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin to thousands of less-known socialists). Yet, there are some particularly revealing aspects in the case of Pashukanis that have not been probed adequately by most Western or Soviet writers. His rise to leadership of Soviet legal work in 1924, with the publication of his The General Theory of Law and Marxism, coincided with Stalin’s initial victory over the Left Opposition and the enunciation of Stalin’s program of seeking to build ‘socialism in one country’. Pashukanis’ unexpected emergence from obscurity appears to be related to the fact that he publicly lined up against the Left Opposition as early as 1925. Pashukanis’ central theme in his General Theory, somewhat simplistically referred to as a ‘commodity-exchange’ theory of law, was related to the limited restoration of commercial property and market relations under the 1921 shift to the New Economic Policy. The dangers inherent in this temporary retreat became entrenched in Stalin’s bureaucratic elite after 1924. As discussed in this article, Pashukanis’ approach, which regarded commodity exchange as the essence of legal relations, to some extent reconciled Marxist theory with the official revival of economic relations based on private ownership and market forces.

Eric Posner’s signaling theory of social norms holds that individuals adopt social norms in order to signal that they have a low discount rate (that is, they value the future more than the present), and are therefore reliable long-term cooperative partners. This paper radically expands Posner’s theory by incorporating internalization into his model (the sense that norms possess some sort of binding quality, an “ought to”). I do this by tethering Posner’s theory to an evolutionary model. I argue that internalization is an adaptive quality that enhances the individual’s ability to play Posner’s signaling game and was thus selected for. The idea that internalization is evolutionarily conditioned is not new; however, linking this to Posner’s theory of discount rate signals is, and doing so offers tremendous explanatory potential.

Part I identifies the limitations of Posner’s purely rational choice approach, argues for the necessity of including internalization, and then proposes a model that does so – what I call the Expanded Signaling Model of Norms (ESM). Part II examines the problems that arise when we embrace such a model. How this model answers some key criticisms plaguing sociobiology is also briefly explored. Part III then examines existing criticisms of Posner’s theory, demonstrating how the Expanded Signaling Model clearly resolves these issues. The paper concludes that incorporating internalization into Posner’s signaling model greatly broadens the explanatory reach of Posner’s theory, providing a measure of clarity and predictability regarding how and why norms are internalized – an important insight, as these beliefs form the normative underpinning to law.

Should property owners have a unique right to express their opinion just because they own property? While current law recognizes owners’ rights to express their voices in certain instances, it does not provide comprehensive and coherent answers to this question. This article provides an analytical framework for recognizing the owners’ right to voice as an independent property entitlement within the owners’ property bundle of rights and delineates its boundaries. Yet even when the owners’ voice is property-dependent, there is a difference between voice that facilitates the realization of another property entitlement (such as the right to exclude, use, or trade) and voice that is constitutive to ownership in and of itself. Only the latter instances justify recognition of the owners’ right to a voice as an independent property entitlement. By examining different branches of both tangible and intellectual property law, such as inheritance law, eminent domain, homeowners’ association law, zoning law, and copyright law, this article demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed analytical framework in explaining certain parts of the current law and suggests modifications of other parts.