IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/oplwec/qt98g8s06r.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rights Eroding by Past Breach

Author

Listed:
  • Ben-Shahar, Omri

Abstract

Legal rights may erode as a result of past, uncontested, breach. In light of ongoing violations, the rightholder's enforcement may result in the loss of the entitlement. The doctrines, of course, of performance in contract law and adverse possession in property law are prominent examples of this widespread erosion phenomenon. In analyzing the effects of such laws, the Article confronts two conflicting intuitions. On the one hand, the "license" to continue breach prospectively encourages opportunism. On the other hand, the risk of erosion may reinforce the rightholder's motivation to take anti-erosion measures, bolstering the credibility of the threat to enforce, thus better preserving the entitlement. The article proves that these two effects of erosion rules always balance out. The same amount of value will be extracted from the right holder irrespective of the law's erosion doctrine. The article also demonstrates the limits of this "irrelevance" claim and the factors that may lead to its collapse. It applies the analysis to offer new perspectives on various prominent legal rules.

Suggested Citation

  • Ben-Shahar, Omri, 1999. "Rights Eroding by Past Breach," Berkeley Olin Program in Law & Economics, Working Paper Series qt98g8s06r, Berkeley Olin Program in Law & Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:oplwec:qt98g8s06r
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/98g8s06r.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:oplwec:qt98g8s06r. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lebrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.