The Legal Foundations of Property 1924–1978

This work traces the evolving interpretation of property as revealed in key U.S. Supreme Court rulings between 1924 and 1978. The degree of influence of any given case is determined by ranking case citations from the time of ruling to the time of writing. A series of queries was applied to the open-source AI, ChatGPT, as a corroborating source. I find that over this period there exist multiple lines of evolving thought regarding the nature of property and the public purpose. First, economic methods and techniques associated with market valuation are increasingly employed as a method to determine what constitutes property as well as the public interest. Second, despite increasing formal economic input, the court consistently finds “space” within the known economic data in which to exercise their discretion over the meanings of property and the public purpose. Third, there exists a “back and forth” between points one and two; namely, that what is decided based upon court discretion, later becomes a matter of economic fact, which in turn leads to new areas of court discretion.