Radin Awarded 2007 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize
University of Michigan Law Professor Margaret Jane Radin was awarded the 2007 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize at a dinner in her honor at the College of William & Mary's historic Wren Building on Oct. 5. The dinner was part of the Fourth Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference sponsored by the William & Mary Property Rights Project and the Institute of Bill of Rights Law.
The prize, first awarded in 2004, recognizes a leading figure in property rights law and was presented to Radin by Professor Eric Kades, director of the Project.
In remarks at the dinner, Kades said Radin was being recognized for her contribution to scholarship on the "personhood" dimension of property rights. "We are honoring her in large part," said Kades, "for her work suggesting that some sorts of property deserve heightened protection, those property interests, such as homes and wedding rings, that help people constitute who they are. This 'personhood' category that Professor Radin invented has been expanding over the last twenty years."
Noting that the three preceding recipients of the Prize have been "squarely interdisciplinary," Kades observed that Radin's work is as well. She is, he said, not only “responsible in large part for introducing continental philosophy into property law, but is also well-schooled in political science and economics and engages those sorts of arguments on their own terms." He added that she is also known for her important contributions to scholarship on the law of cyber-space and intellectual property law.
Radin is professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to joining the Michigan faculty in fall 2007, she was the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law at Stanford University. She also has been on the faculty of the University of Southern California Law Center and has been a visiting professor at UCLA and Harvard. Radin has published prolifically on property rights theory and institutions, commodification, intellectual property, and cyberlaw. Highlights of her property scholarship appear in Contested Commodities (Harvard University Press, 1996) and Reinterpreting Property (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Previous Prize recipients include Professor Frank I. Michelman of Harvard University (2004), Professor Richard A. Epstein of the University of Chicago (2005), and Professor James W. Ely of Vanderbilt University (2006)
The Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize is named in recognition of Toby P. Brigham and Gideon Kanner for their lifetime contributions to private property rights and their efforts to advance pertinent constitutional protections. Brigham is a founding partner of Brigham Moore in Florida and has specialized in eminent domain and property rights law for more than 40 years. Gideon Kanner is professor of law emeritus at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and is currently Of Counsel at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in California.