ABSTRACT
Certain legal and economics scholars, such as Cooter and Ulen, advocate that the law give the right to the person who would purchase it if the transaction costs were zero. The illusion cannot be maintained after reading Joan Youngman’s 1983 paper, although that was not its main purpose. The paper is an inventory of how people have created a variety of different interests in real property and how those arrangements affect the observable market value. Taxes on private land are instrumentally equivalent to rental fees on publicly owned land, and both are sources of government revenue. The courts speak of the “whole land,” but it is a particular person that pays the tax. The landmark case regarding easements involved a golf course that was built as part of a housing development and that enhanced the value of the residential lots.
