Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives - Softcover

Heller, Michael A.; Salzman, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525565507 ISBN 13: 9780525565505

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“Mine” is one of the first words babies learn, and by the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether we are buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you, reclining, or the squished laptop user behind you? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it’s okay to knock off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, while in New York you lose both the space and the chair?

In Mine!, Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading authorities on ownership, explain these puzzles and many more. Remarkably, they reveal, there are just six simple rules that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the rule that steers us to do what they want. But we can pick differently. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. Mine! draws on mind-bending, often infuriating, and always fascinating accounts from business, history, courtrooms, and everyday life to reveal how the rules of ownership control our lives and shape our world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL HELLER is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.
 
JAMES SALZMAN is the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, with joint appointments at the UCLA School of Law and the UCSB Bren School of the Environment. He is the author of Drinking Water: A History.

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Chapter 1

First Come, Last Served

Line-­Standers

The best free show in Washington, D.C. is the Supreme Court. The courtroom is both ornate and intimate. You sit only steps from the justices of the highest court in the land and listen to America’s top advocates. This is democracy at its best, open and accessible to all. If you want to witness the fate of abortion, gun control, or religious freedom, you can. But you need to get there early—­there are on average fewer than one hundred seats available for the public, and admission is first come, first served.

For high-­profile cases, people arrive a day or more ahead of time, armed with camping chairs, sleeping bags, ponchos, and extra batteries for their smartphones. Folks in line tend to look out for one another—­Supreme Court police officers refuse to monitor the line. If you have to go to the bathroom, those around you will hold your place. And they will also be on guard for people cutting in or adding friends. If someone does that, they are harangued with cries of “no cutting” and “back of the line.”

As the time to enter the Court approaches, though, a strange thing happens. Many of the disheveled people nearest the front of the line exchange their spots with gray-­suited men and women. A little later the well-­dressed enter the courtroom and take the best seats while those farther back in the line are not even admitted. What is going on?

Welcome to the line-­standing business. Companies are paying line-­standers, sometimes homeless people, to arrive days ahead, secure a spot at the front, and then wait and wait and wait. At the last minute, by the Court entrance etched with the words equal justice under law, the line-­standers give way to paying clients who have the money to get in first but not the time or patience to wait. Small start-­ups like Linestanding.com, Skip the Line, and Washington Express charge clients up to $6,000 for a “free” seat, while paying minimum wage to the hired line-­standers who wait in the rain and cold.

Line-­standing companies have transformed how seats become mine not just for Supreme Court arguments but also for open congressional hearings where the nation’s laws are debated. Hearing rooms used to be free to anyone willing to wait to see their elected representatives in action. Now those hearings are often packed with lawyers and lobbyists, all of whom paid, none of whom waited. The same transformation is happening in lines for new passports at the local federal building or building permits at City Hall.

Paid line-­standers are a booming business in the private sector as well. If you’re willing to pay, you can get to the front for new iPhones at Apple stores, hot skatewear apparel at Supreme, rush Broadway show tickets, or even prime spots on New York City streets to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One line-­stander employed by SOLD (Same Ole Line Dudes), a line-­standing start-­up, waited forty-­three hours holding a spot so a client could be sure to get an audition for Shark Tank, the hit reality TV show for start-­ups. Odds are that Robert Samuel, the entrepreneurial founder of SOLD, would have done better on the show than the guy from Colorado who paid Samuel for his place in line.

The same transition is happening online. The musical Hamilton was continuously sold out on Broadway for years after it opened. The producers of the show made most tickets available on a first-­in-­time basis on their website. The problem was that tech-­savvy scalpers created computer programs—­bots—­that bought up all the tickets the microsecond they became available. As a result, the artists and producers earned only the tickets’ face value while fans paid scalpers’ premiums, often a multiple of the original price, on sites such as StubHub. Many weeks ticket scalpers earned more from Hamilton than did the producers and artists who put on the show. What good is the first-­in-­time rule if a bot will always jump the line faster than a mortal with a mouse? When Hamilton tried to outsmart the scalpers by making some tickets available only at the theater box office, companies like SOLD hired line-­standers to snag them. 

Bruce Springsteen tried another approach when he played his sold-­out run on Broadway. He paired with TicketMaster as it debuted Verified Fan, an online system that aimed to circumvent the bots and line-­standers and get at least some tickets directly to prescreened real fans. But even those tickets often ended up on the resale market—­you have to be quite committed to the Boss to turn down a $10,000 offer for an $850 ticket.

How should we think about this rapid rise of paying to get to the head of the line?

For many, this transformation seems deeply unfair and undemocratic. One disappointed woman stood for days in line at the Supreme Court and still did not get to hear the 2015 case establishing the right to same-sex marriage. The real system, she said, is “Let’s pay the poor Black guys to hold the line for rich white people.” On the other hand, maybe line-­standing should be viewed as a good thing—­capitalism at its best, creating new jobs where none existed before, both for programmers scripting their bots and for the poor and homeless waiting in lines.

We never used to ask these questions. But today we must, because first-­in-­time is being dismantled from within.

Who’s on First?

For most of human history, for most resources, the rule for establishing original ownership followed a maxim expressed in ancient Roman law as “Whoever is earlier in time is stronger in right.” In other words, First come, first served.

This has long been the practice in families. Think back to your childhood Bible lessons. Why did Jacob put an animal skin on his arm to trick his blind father, Isaac, into thinking he was blessing Esau, Jacob’s rough-­skinned brother? Esau was born first and by right should have received his father’s gifts. Being first got you not only paternal blessings but also earthly treasure. Jacob’s trickery let him jump the line.

The practice of primogeniture, inheritance by the firstborn son, has long decided the succession of royal families around the world. It still does today, with an egalitarian twist in countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands, which now pass the crown to the monarch’s firstborn child rather than just the first son.

First-­in-­time governed colonial exploration as well. Colonies in the New World were carved up among the European powers based on which nation’s ex­plorer was first to plant his sovereign’s flag. This may hold some intuitive appeal for uninhabited lands, but what about places with people already living there? If being first is what counts, surely Native Americans had the stronger claim for owning America. Not so, said the international law of the time—­as written by the European powers. When Europeans came to America, they defined first to mean “the first Christian discoverer.”

And here lies a key to understanding this ancient maxim for making things mine. Even something as factual-­sounding as “who’s first” is not self-­defining. The right question is “Who decides who’s first?” In American law, the answer is “The conqueror prescribes its limits,” according to Chief Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. M’Intosh, an 1823 Supreme Court decision that most lawyers read during their early days in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525565507
• ISBN 13: 9780525565505
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House Ireland; https://eu-contact.penguin.ie; ; Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street; Dublin; D02 YH68; Irland