ABSTRACT
The fi rst issue is the source or sources of property rights. According to what Williamson calls the “legal-centralist” view (1983:520), the state is the exclusive creator of property rights. Many scholars, including Thomas Hobbes (1909:97-98), Garrett Hardin, and Guido Calabresi (1972:1090-91), have at times succumbed to legal-centralist thinking. An opposing view holds that property rights may emerge from sources other than the state-in particular, from the workings of nonhierarchical social forces. The whaling evidence refutes legal-centralism and strongly supports the proposition that property rights may arise anarchically out of social custom.2
