ABSTRACT
Attempts to perform an economic analysis of different tenets of property law have been dominantly made by utilizing the framework of transaction costs and property rights, first applied to this topic by Ronald Coase in The Problem of Social Cost. This interdisciplinary framework has since been extrapolated to numerous topics such as public domain, contract choice, divided ownership, firms and slavery. Even though the framework serves as the exemplary contribution of Law and Economics to economic analysis, in the past decades its application to property law has been recurrently criticized for its inability to account for crucial legal aspects of property. In this chapter, I use the framework of philosophy of interdisciplinarity to rethink the stakes of different definitions of property rights. It turns out that the choice of the appropriate definition depends on estimating the risks and benefits of taking a riskier interdisciplinary research path.
