Some Notes on Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Criminal Law

The property-liability rules framework, which offers a robust positive theory of criminal law, has come under attack in recent years. One critique, which I label the Indifference Proposition, argues that property rules and liability rules are equivalent in low transaction cost settings. In this paper I examine the conditions under which the Indifference Proposition is valid. In several plausible low transaction-cost settings the proposition is not valid