Introduction

This book is a long term result of my teaching in the European Master of Law and Economics course. I started up this master course, together with Gerrit De Geest, in 1989. This master course involves now ten universities in Europe and India and awards annually between eighty and one hundred degrees to students with a legal or economic training. For nearly thirty years (1990–2018), I taught the course Property Law and Economics in Ghent. In order to make my teaching more varied I organized, in addition to the formal teaching of the theory, sessions in which each student was assigned a case and was expected to briefly explain the case to the class audience and make an economic analysis of it. The presentation was followed by a brief discussion among the students. As years passed by, an impressive and rich stock of case analyses piled up. As I thought that this stock of intellectual experience was too valuable to get sent to the shredder or to be deleted from my computer files, the idea came to my mind to integrate these case analyses in a book in which theory on the economics of property rights would be combined with a discussion of cases. Although many case analyses made by the students were quite inspiring for me, I redrafted the analyses entirely. All factual errors, imperfections, omissions, logical mishaps, wrong legal constructions, flawed economic reasoning and empirical mistakes that one may discover in this book are all on my account. On a website especially set up for this book, all names of the students of the last twelve classes (2006–2018) are mentioned. In this way, I thank them for their contribution, and I hope that when this message reaches them it may resuscitate good memories of their stay at the Ghent University.