My second-most cited law review article, “Coase and the Constitution” (Guerra-Pujol, 2011), one of six scholarly papers I have written inspired by the ideas of the late Ronald Coase, presents a Coasean or property-rights method for resolving disputes over federalism. That is, instead of attempting to draw an arbitrary boundary line between local and national spheres of power through legal, historical, or semantic analyses of a country’s constitution, my Quixotic paper proposes the creation of alternative “federalism markets” in which governmental powers and functions would be allocated to Congress, the States, or even private firms through decentralized auction mechanisms and secondary markets. Since its initial publication in volume 14 of the Richmond Journal of Law and Public Interest, “Coase and the Constitution” has been cited at least five times in the scholarly literature, including, I confess, one self-citation:
- Aziz Z. Huq, “The Negotiated Structural Constitution,” Columbia Law Review, Vol. 114, No. 7 (2014), pp. 1595-1686.
- Erin Ryan, “Negotiating Federalism and the Structural Constitution” (Reply to Professor Huq), Columbia Law Review Sidebar, Vol. 115 (2015), pp. 4-38.
- Christian B. Sundquist, “Positive Education Federalism,” Mercer Law Review, Vol. 68 (2017), pp. 351-387.
- Trent J. MacDonald, The Political Economy of Non-Territorial Exit, Elgar (2019).
- Enrique Guerra-Pujol (self-citation), “The Poker-Litigation Game,” arxiv:1509.01214 (20 Jun 2015), pp. 1-17.
I will be reading the first four of these scholarly works and replying to them in the next few days. (As an aside, I will revisit my six other Coasean papers as well, and I will also resume my extended review of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which I began late last year.)
prior probability 