Law: Property Rights 
Essential
Copyrights and Property Rights
On April 26, the Cato Institute hosted a conference on “Copyright Controversies: Freedom, Property, Content Creation, and the DMCA.” Speakers included Cato’s director of information policy studies Jim Harper; David K. Levine, coauthor of Against Intellectual Monopoly; and Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro.
On Property and Government
By John Locke: "Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself."
Recommended
Paths to Property
By Karol Boudreaux and Paul Aligica: "The study finds that the “easy option” of agencies entering less-developed countries and using blueprints to try to recreate institutions in Africa that work effectively in the West often fails miserably. Indeed, the failures of such approaches can give the whole privatisation and property rights process, vital for sustainable economic growth, a bad name."
National City: Eminent Domain Gone Wild
Reason.tv host Drew Carey visits National City, California, where the local government is taking eminent domain abuse to new lows.
China's Legacy: The Thoughts of Lao Tzu
By James Dorn: "China's present leaders are calling for a "harmonious society", but this is impossible without widespread freedom and a rule of law that limits the power of government to the protection of people and property. "
Public Power, Private Gain
This comprehensive report, prepared by the Institute for Justice and senior attorney Dana Berliner, carefully catalogues the extent of the problem of eminent domain abuse. It illustrates how municipal good intention, often for urban redevelopment or economic promise, can be unfairly built upon the rightful ownership of others. When projects are carried out heavy-handedly and unnecessarily, not through voluntary transaction, but coercion, the protection of property is eroded and our bedrock freedom to decide upon our own course is worn away.
The Institution of Property
David Schmidtz discusses the institutional history of property as the right to exclude others from using one's possession.
Property Rights on Imperial China's Frontiers
By Peter C. Perdue: By looking at how China's Qing dynasty handled several cases of land settlement in the eighteenth century, Peter C. Perdue shows that the state did respect private property rights, but it intervened to change rights to land for political and economic purposes.
'Knowing' Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840 – 1864
Experience shows that Common Law and Private Property Rights can be an alternative to top-down regulation on air pollution. In this essay, Christine Meisner Rosen examines nuisance law "from the perspective of an environmental historian who is interested in how people made sense of industrial pollution problems in the past."
Community-Run Fisheries: Avoiding the "Tragedy of the Commons"
By Donald R. Leal: "Community-Run Fisheries: Avoiding the "Tragedy of the Commons" presents case after case of communities that have effectively protected their fishing territories and preserved fish for the future."