What are the pre-political grounds of property rights? What are the just uses of property according to natural rights and the natural law? In this episode, Prof. Eric Claeys, presents his research to these questions in his new book with Cambridge University Press, Natural Property Rights. Claeys, discusses the ways a natural right for property is justified and limited, drawing on sources from ancient, medieval and contemporary analytic philosophy. Claeys also describes the history of how a natural right understanding of property has influenced American positive law and jurisprudence. We are grateful to be joined by Prof. Claeys for a discussion on the grounds of property rights in this new episode.
Eric R. Claeys is Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. In his scholarship, Professor Claeys studies theories of natural law and natural rights and their implications in property law. Professor Claeys is a member of the American Law Institute, he serves on the ALI’s Members’ Consultative Group for the first Restatement of Copyright, and he also serves as an adviser to the Restatement (Fourth) of the Law of Property.
Professor Claeys received his AB from Princeton University and his JD from the University of Southern California Law School. After law school, Professor Claeys clerked for the Hon. Melvin Brunetti, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States. He has also taught at Saint Louis University, the University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard Law School, and he is a member of the Princeton Politics Department’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
Professor Claeys’s main teaching interests include Property, Torts, Jurisprudence, and Intellectual Property. He also teaches Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, Water Law, Remedies, Estates and Trusts, Trade Secrecy, Food and Drug Law, and Oil and Gas Law.
