Ostrom and the lawyers: The impact of Governing the Commons on the American legal academy

Abstract

American legal academics began to cite Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons (GC) shortly after its 1990 publication, with citations peaking in the mid-2000s and with signs of a new peak in 2010 in the wake of Ostrom's Nobel Prize in Economics. The legal scholars most interested in GC have worked in three areas: general property theory, environmental and natural resource law, and since the mid-1990s, intellectual property. In all those areas legal scholars have found GC and its many examples a strong source of support for the proposition that people can cooperate to overcome common pool resource issues, managing resources through informal norms rather than either individual property or coercive government. Legal academics have also been at least mildly critical of GC, however. A number have tried to balance the attractive features of GC's governance model -stability and sustainability -with more standard legal models favoring toward open markets, fluid change and egalitarianism.

Le logiciel libre et les communs

“…Sur ces bases, les juristes défendant le domaine public et les biens communs informationnels ont construit plusieurs passerelles entre le mouvement du logiciel libre et la réflexion sur les communs. Il leur est progressivement apparu que les analyses d'Ostrom, bien que développées à partir de terrains très éloignés du monde numérique, n'étaient pas sans lien avec leurs préoccupations (Rose, 2011). Il invitèrent ainsi la chercheuse de Bloomington à une grande conférence organisée par James Boyle en 2001 à l'université de Duke : « The Conference on the Public Domain ».…”

IP Things as Boundary Objects: The Case of the Copyright Work

“…Collective governance of shared resources, such as water systems, is not easily accommodated to a thing-based sensibility. Governance in such settings may be marginalized by property scholars as raising comparatively rare and exceptional questions (Rose 2011(Rose , 2015Smith 2016).…”

Governing the Commons for two decades: A complex story

“…Three essays in this special feature explore the specific meaning of Governing the Commons for our thinking about and understanding of property rights. Rose (2011) discusses how Governing the Commons has been received by legal scholars and the impact the book has had on their particular field of study. The book's message of a place for communities and community resource management somewhere in between private property and state regulation, proved appealing to many in this field.…”