Strahilevitz, Lior Jacob --- "Unilateral Relinquishment of Property" [2011] ELECD 150; in Ayotte, Kenneth; Smith, E. Henry (eds), "Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law

Editor(s): Ayotte, Kenneth; Smith, E. Henry

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847209795

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Unilateral Relinquishment of Property

Author(s): Strahilevitz, Lior Jacob

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

6 Unilateral relinquishment of property
Lior Jacob Strahilevitz*


Suppose you have property that you would like to get rid of. There are five basic avenues
for doing so. Sale is probably the first option that springs to mind, and this can be effec-
tuated through a voluntary transfer (at a flea market, say), or involuntary transfer (as
when the government exercises eminent domain). Donation is another obvious means of
parting with a resource. Less obviously, but no less critically, you can get rid of property
through sheer passivity: if a trespasser settles on your land and uses it as a normal person
would for years, the trespasser eventually becomes its owner through adverse possession.
These three mechanisms for losing title to property have been covered at great length in
the legal literature.
Rather little has been said about the two other mechanisms for relinquishing prop-
erty: abandonment and destruction. They will be the subject of this chapter. The impor-
tant commonality between abandonment and destruction is their unilateral nature.
Sales, gifts, and adverse possession all require bilateral interactions, but abandonment
and destruction permit the owner of a resource to relinquish it without requiring any
action by a third party. These two avenues for losing property turn out to be common,
important, widely practiced, and largely undertheorized. Perhaps as a result of that last
attribute, the law of abandonment and destruction is poorly thought through and in
need of reform.


I. ABANDONMENT

On an ordinary Wednesday in August of 2008, there ...