Prop1 Class 2 – Efficiency and Fairness

January 20th, 2014

Today in class we will be talking about Ghen v. Rich and Keeble v. Hickeringill, through the lens of economic efficiency and fairness.

Today’s lecture notes are here. Today’s live chat is here.

Ghen v. Rich.

Here is the harvesting of a finback whale.

Finback_whale

Fin whales are on average about 90 feet long, and can weigh over 70 tons. By point of comparison, an African elephant weighs roughly 8 tons.

fin2g

Fin Whale

 

This is a bomb lance harpoon.

Bomb_Lance_Harpoon_for_whales

And a patent diagram of an 1878 bomb lance:

408px-DImg

Another patent diagram from 1879.

408px-Bomb_Lance_Patent_2

 

408px-Bomb_lance_patent_3

More pics of bomb lances. It was basically a harpoon with a rocket attached to it.

Bomb_Lance_1

Bomb_Lance_2

This is a bomb lance gun.

Bomb_lance_gun

Here is a drawing from 1897 showing the firing of a bomb lance (Frank T. Bullen, The Cruise of the Cachalot (1897)

Bomb_lance

 

This is what a captured whale looks like:

Captured_fin_whale

Keeble v. Hickeringill

Here is Edmund Hickeringill (courtesy of the British Musuem)–doesn’t he just look like a jerk!?

hickeringill

This is Lord Chief Justice John Holt who was the Lord Chief Justice of England, the author of the opinion in Keeble v. Hickeringill.

Sir_John_Holt_by_Richard_Van_Bleeck

Here is a plan for the duck decoy.

Keeble

The ducks get caught in these nets over the pipes.

Decoy_in_action

 

Duckdecoypond

BoarstallDuckDecoy

Here is a dutch video showing the ducks getting cut (fast forward to about 1:05)

I suspect many of you have tried this kind of duck hunting.

DuckHuntBox

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1NyIsZXeqU]

 

Coase Theorem

To illustrate the Coase Theorem, we will utilize the classic example of the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami.

fountainbleau

 

fountain2

Or this related case from Dallas:

The Nasher contends that the developers of the $200 million tower, completed in January, have been intransigent in refusing to modify its reflective glass skin; the Nasher has proposed louvers for the facade.

Museum officials say the garden has had to be resodded twice because of the higher temperatures created by sunlight bouncing off the glass; that some trees have burned; and that light-blocking panels were needed for the roof during a recent Ken Price sculpture retrospective.

glare

 

And the owners have suggested building screens to block the sun!

Gizmodo has a great writeup of the case:

They also hired a group of designers to study the feasibility of installing a gigantic shading system to block the rays, rather than fixing the problem at the source.

This month, the architects behind the project—a New York firm called REX, which built the (fantastic) Wyly Theater near the Nasher—presented their final proposal, dubbed Surya.

It looks complex, but the concept is actually very simple: The team looked at the annual path of the “death ray” and, based on its coordinates, created a huge shading system to block it as it changes. To lessen the presence of the shade, they also devised a series of umbrella-like devices that only open up when needed. So, for most of the year, these devices look like thin tubes strung up on a massive metal frame—which is better than an opaque surface… I guess?

Coase!

REX-SURYA2-OK-P1

This is like something Mr. Burns would design.

The “umbrellas” open up during different times of the day so as not to obstruct the views.

20130130091742_08-Closing-Opening-Umbrella

And they follow the sun’s path through the year.

20131024064934_03_Sunrays

20130201121822_04a-Moving-Sunspots

Images courtesy of dukeminier-property.com, Wikipedia, and Professor Frank Buckley.