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Perspectives: Issue 357 Escape from Taxation
6 April 2010, Wall Street Journal Opinion
New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie must be following the economic news from
Greece. Its tattered reputation for fiscal control has turned Greece into an international
financial nightmare and laughingstock. Perhaps tiring of New Jersey jokes, Governor
Christie this week handed down a stiff freeze on spending.
Announcing the freeze on $1.6 billion of unspent money, Mr. Christie was blunt:
"Today, we come to terms with the fact that we cannot spend money on everything we
want. Today, the days of Alice in Wonderland budgeting in Trenton end."
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Books and reports: The Foreshore and Seabed
29 March 2005, Richard A Epstein
Natural law and property
On my last visit to New Zealand in 1999 I spoke as an outsider to a sceptical
audience on how best to interpret the Treaty of Waitangi.1 I said that one of
the great challenges facing a country formed by successive waves of immigrants
is to put together disparate norms from rival cultures, each of which has its
own distinctive legal understandings as to how the world does or should work.
On that occasion I said that I would like to start from a neutral corner, and
then proceeded to address several Roman law analogues to the question of
prescriptive rights, largely on the basis that the great Roman authors were not
influenced by the future events that unfolded in New Zealand. On this occasion,
I plan to do likewise in discussing the foreshore and seabed. Rather than trying
to deal with this topic from the point of view of English law on the one hand
or Maori customary law on the other, I want to locate some kind of tertiam quid
- a third point - from which to begin the analysis. So for yet another time I
find an unexpected use of my training as a Roman property lawyer, which has
long augmented the English property law that I learned as a student at Oxford
many years ago. I also begin with the confession that, even after the advent of
law and economics, I remain much influenced by the writings of Gaius and
Justinian on the creation and organisation of property rights.
NZ $12.50
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