The Lawlessness of Property and Ownership
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2021
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Professor Michael Heller, one of the authors of Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, for the latest installment of Amicus’ summer season of episodes exploring books and films about the law.
Podcast production by Sara Burningham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We should get paid to give up our privacy. |
| 0:06.0 | And as citizens, we can push for that. |
| 0:08.3 | But we have to understand that there are this very simple handful of ownership stories that are driving all these debates. |
| 0:15.8 | And the people who are the real owners are pretty good at telling their story. |
| 0:23.9 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 0:26.9 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the Supreme Court and the law and the rule of law. |
| 0:32.1 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this week is part of our summer blockbuster series on books or films, ideas that you may have missed that you might want to mull over a little bit over the summer while the court is in recess. |
| 0:47.2 | And we wanted to talk this week about mine, how the hidden rules of ownership control our lives. |
| 0:54.2 | This book was co-written by Michael Heller and James Saltzman. |
| 0:58.2 | It was published by Doubleday this past spring. |
| 1:01.5 | Mine seeks to do for ownership what Freakonomics did for incentives and what Nudge did for our cognitive biases. |
| 1:09.4 | It opens up a new kind of counterintuitive and I thought |
| 1:14.1 | really fascinating way to think about the world that we all take for granted. I'm joined this |
| 1:20.2 | week by one of the authors, Michael Heller, who is the Lawrence A. Ween professor of real estate |
| 1:26.2 | law at Columbia Law School. He's also the vice dean there. |
| 1:29.6 | So Michael Heller, welcome to Anacus. |
| 1:33.0 | It's so great to be with you here. |
| 1:34.4 | And I want to start by saying that you both open and close the book with toddler rules, which I love. |
| 1:42.4 | And that mine is actually the very first word that many toddlers say. I think it was probably the third for mine. Mine. And we feel like we have an intuitive, kind of cognitive, cultural understanding of what mine means. But the whole point of the book is that almost all of |
| 2:03.7 | that is wrong. And that I know in a minute we're going to talk about your maxims, your six |
| 2:09.5 | big maxims, but I wonder just by way of setting the table, if you can tell us a little bit |
| 2:15.3 | about what if there is some overarching theme of how toddlers think about the world and why they're wrong, if you could distill it for us? |
... |
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