PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Judge, Rebecca P.
TI  - Restoring the Commons: Toward a New Interpretation of Locke’s Theory of Property
AID  - 10.2307/3146893
DP  - 2002 Aug 01
TA  - Land Economics
PG  - 331--338
VI  - 78
IP  - 3
4099  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/78/3/331.short
4100  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/78/3/331.full
SO  - Land Econ2002 Aug 01; 78
AB  - John Locke’s theory of property, described in his Second Treatise on Civil Government, exerts a strong but often unacknowledged influence on environmental economics, providing justification for many of our discipline’s norms and practices. This paper examines how Locke’s Enlightenment-era thesis has informed our understanding of the relation of the individual and the state to environmental amenities. While Locke has been used to justify a libertarian view that treats any form of environmental regulation as a “taking,” elements of Locke’s original argument can be understood to subject individual rights claims to constraints requiring intra- and intergenerational sufficiency and sustainability. (JEL K11, Q2)