Delivered at:: Department of Civil and Entrepreneurial Law (Faculty of Computer Science, Economics, and Social Sciences)

Course type:: Elective course

When:: 1 year, 1 module

Abstract

The discipline «Property and Liability: An Introduction to Law and Economics» is an online course. It is implemented in the format of blended learning with the use of the Coursera online platform. The full name of the course on the platform is «Property and Liability: An Introduction to Law and Economics». Link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/property-law-and-economics Course Developer: Wesleyan University, Richard Adelstein - Professor, Department of Economics. The discipline is elective and it’s included in the elective part of the curriculum. When implementing various types of educational activities, the following types of educational technologies are used: problematic lectures, conference lectures, problematic workshops, discussion seminars, analysis of practical tasks and business games. Part of the lectures is presented in an interactive form. Discussions with practicing lawyers and government officials are provided in the course program.

Learning Objectives

profound study of the relations associated with the implementation, protection and termination of property rights and comparing the property rights to the liability rights; study of the doctrinal understanding of the property rights; study of the oldest and most known principles of American law – property rights and proportional liability for violation of property rights; implementation of economic categories the property rights, obligation rights and proportional liability for their violation.

Expected Learning Outcomes

The student knows the main concepts of the property institution.
The student correlates the categories of exchange and efficiency, property, profitability and technology.
The student interprets the external effects of economic activity.The student interprets property crimes and the types of punishment.The student comprehends criminal proceedings regarding property crimes.
The student comprehends criminal proceedings regarding property crimes.
The student interprets the external effects of economic activity.
The student uses the acquired knowledge to develop solutions to the tasks and justify them. The student reasonably uses the research methods and the methods of organizing activities. The student considers the social and multicultural differences when solving problems in professional activities. The student defines and interprets the practical and cultural components of professional and social activities.
The student defines and interprets the practical and cultural components of professional and social activities.

Course Contents

Part 1: General aspects of property
Topic 1: Property Property is where law and economics meet, but it's not a simple concept. Property is not an object or a relation between people and objects, but a set of rights, relations among people over who is to control each of the many uses to which objects can be put. Different people may control different uses of an object, that is, have different property rights over its various uses, at the same time, or control the same use of the object at different times. When new uses create disputes, the law must define new property rights and allocate them initially to resolve the dispute – someone must be deemed to have won the dispute and be given initial ownership of the new rights. But once the former disputants are allowed to trade these rights among themselves, surprising results follow. Topic 2: Exchange and Efficiency Voluntary exchange implies mutual benefit – when people trade property rights, it's because they each believe that what they get from the trade will be more valuable to them than what they have to give up to get it. So if there are no obstacles to voluntary exchange, that is, if transaction costs are low, property rights will end up in the hands of the person who values them the most, a result economists call an efficient allocation of the rights. What happens when there are barriers that impede or prevent property rights from reaching their highest valuing owner through exchange? Can the law assign property rights to achieve efficient allocation in such cases? Should it try, or are there values other than efficient allocation the law might try to advance, along with or instead of efficient allocation, in assigning property rights? Topic 3: Externality Exchange involves both benefit and cost – traders take rights from others, imposing costs on them but creating benefit for themselves, but they must compensate the others for their costs by paying for the rights they've taken. External costs are imposed when one person takes another's rights without paying for them, which leads to the taker taking more rights than efficient allocation would allow and leaves the victim uncompensated for the costs of losing the rights. The law's response to this inefficiency and injustice is liability, forcing those who take rights without payment to compensate those whose rights they have taken for the costs they have borne. Thinking about how the law determines these liability prices, and how people might respond to them, reveals the underlying economic logic of liability. Topic 4: Property, Utility and Technology The concept of property is developed in two new directions. One concerns the problem of eminent domain and evokes the ancient conflict between individual rights and collective needs – in what circumstances, and to what extent, should private property be protected against uncompensated taking by government? How do the different theories of property considered earlier each answer this question? The other asks how voluntary exchange can be organized when technology makes it easy for people to take others' property rights without compensation. If existing rights are insufficient to prevent these takings from occurring on a large enough scale to make voluntary exchange impossible, new kinds of property rights are needed to encourage efficient levels of production and exchange. This is illustrated by the problem of intellectual goods and the new forms of property that have evolved over centuries to make exchange in ideas possible.
Part 2. Property and criminal liability
Topic 5: Crime and Punishment Some externalities involve only a few uncompensated losers of rights whose costs are easily reckoned in monetary terms, so that forcing the taker to pay exactly these costs to the victims ensures both that victims will be fairly compensated and that takers will take rights only where they value the rights more than the losers do. The law calls these externalities torts, and the same principle of liability pricing extends to crimes, in which, with the same unlawful act, someone simultaneously takes the rights of many people who suffer moral costs that can't be satisfactorily measured by money. As with torts, some crimes may be efficient reallocations of rights, and the logic of liability shows that proportional punishment can, ideally, discover which crimes are or are not efficient and force all takers to compensate their victims in full for what they take. Topic 6: Criminal Procedure Criminal liability means that crimes have prices, and how these prices are exacted in practice from people who take rights without compensation is the problem of criminal procedure. How do judges know who is guilty, and what prices guilty people should be made to pay for their crimes? Around the world, two major systems of adjudicating guilt and punishment, the adversarial and the inquisitorial, have evolved over centuries to answer these questions in individual cases, with very different procedures to assess guilt and punishment that express different commitments to truth and fairness. All these procedures are expensive, and governments everywhere must confront the problem of processing large caseloads with limited resources. This has led the inquisitorial systems of Europe and the adversarial systems of England and the United States to new procedures of adjudication that may be reducing the differences between them.

Assessment Elements

Seminar grade
аудиторная работа (в форме обсуждения в аудитории лекционного материала курса, устные ответы на вопросы и задания, решение задач и выполнение заданий в рамках тематики учебной дисциплины, ведение конспектов лекций). - classroom work (in the form of a discussion in the audience of the lecture material of the course, answers to questions and assignments, solving problems and completing assignments within the framework of the subject of the course, conducting lecture notes).
Self-work grade
самостоятельная работа (в форме домашнего задания по последовательному выполнению заданий на портале «Coursera» по каждой теме в рамках заданных программой сайта временных параметров). - individual work (in the form of homework for the consistent execution of assignments on Coursera portal on each topic within the time parameters specified by the program site).
Exam grade (тест с закрытыми и открытыми вопросами (lms)
Экзамен проводиться в письменном виде в форме теста. The examination is carried out in writing in the form of a test. Дисциплина не состоялась

Interim Assessment

Interim assessment (1 module)
0.6 * Exam grade (тест с закрытыми и открытыми вопросами (lms) + 0.2 * Self-work grade + 0.2 * Seminar grade

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

Charles Fried. Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation//Print publication date: 2015 Print ISBN-13: 9780190240158//Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2015 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190240158.001.0001
Laura Underkuffler. The Idea of Property: Its Meaning and Power//Print publication date: 2003 Print ISBN-13: 9780199254187//Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199254187.001.0001

Recommended Additional Bibliography

James Penner. The Idea of Property in Law//Print publication date: 2000 Print ISBN-13: 9780198299264//Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198299264.001.0001

Master’s Programme 'Legal Support of Entrepreneurial Activity'

Property and Liability: An Introduction to Law and Economics

Course Syllabus