Self-Help and the Nature of Property

Abstract

Self-help and the law's response to it lie at the center of a system of property rights. This has become all the more apparent as questions of property - and whether to employ property law at all - have arisen in the digital world. In this Article, I argue that self-help comes in different varieties corresponding to different strategies for delineating entitlements. Like property entitlements more generally, the law does not regulate self-help in as detailed a fashion as it could if delineation were costless. Both property entitlements and self-help show far less symmetry and a far lesser degree of tailoring than we would expect in a world in which we did not face delineation costs of devising, describing, communicating, and enforcing the content of rights and privileges to use resources.