4. Amplifying Property Rights
4. Amplifying Property Rights
- Sarah WorthingtonSarah WorthingtonDeputy Director and Professor of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract
Celebrated for their conceptual clarity, titles in the Clarendon Law Series offer concise, accessible overviews of major fields of law and legal thought. This chapter considers Equity's special techniques for safeguarding property interests. Property's primary protection comes from rules that enable disputing parties to resolve title conflicts and priority disputes. Absolute justice is unlikely; the law must simply decide who has the stronger claim. Property's secondary protection is more controversial. Equity's tracing and claiming strategies allow claimants to assert new proprietary rights in substitute assets. These rights preserve the insolvency priority of the initial proprietary claim or secure entitlements to windfall secondary profits. Neither of these options follows inevitably from the initial assertion of a proprietary right.
