Richard Epstein — Parking
and Property
A hallowed tradition allows
Chicago car owners who shovel out post-snowfall parking
places to retain squatting rights—often staked out
by tired-looking tables or chairs—until the streets
are plowed or the white stuff melts. “Dibs in the
snow” is a winter way of life to the city’s
drivers, but to Richard A. Epstein it’s also an intellectual
puzzle.
For Epstein, the James Parker Hall distinguished
service professor in the Law School, dibs is all about property
rights, “a long-term research interest of mine,”
he wrote in an e-mail from snow-free Palo Alto, California,
where he spent winter quarter as a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution. “Finding the optimal mix between
private and common property covers an enormous range of
issues.”
His analysis of dibs—part of a
2001 working paper, “The
Allocation of the Commons: Parking and Stopping on the Commons”—weighs
the system in pluses and minuses. Yes, dibs reduces available
parking spaces, but it also rewards those who have put the
effort into the job. Would the shovelers spend all that
time if they only got to use the space just once? In this
way dibs provides “a trade-off not dissimilar to that
found in the patent and copyright law. The initial digger
of the spot is given a limited monopoly for its use.”
As with patents and copyrights, the question becomes, What
ought that duration to be?
“This
issue is really critical,” Epstein noted. “This
past weekend I was at a conference on copyright, and the
question of the commons lurks very large in intellectual
property. Do we want to have shorter or longer protected
terms? Do we allow for the patenting or copying of software?
When do drugs fall into the commons?”
Although the theoretical issues
posed by dibs drive Epstein’s research, the longtime
Hyde Parker also cites local stimuli: “I was on the
north campus planning group where parking was a bear; I
saw the empty spots near Giordano’s when I went for
pizza. And who could forget watching those chairs in parking
spots in winter?”
—M.R.Y.
Select an expert:
Riccardo Levi-Setti - Trilobites
Richard Epstein - Parking
and Property
Mary Anne Case - Toilet
Inequities
Roman Weil - Vintage
Wine
Robert Grant - Sunken Submarines
David Galenson - Poetic
Values
John Milton - Poise
and Noise
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