Professor Gregory S. Alexander to Be Honored with Annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize
Professor Gregory S. Alexander, A. Robert Noll Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Cornell Law School, has been named the recipient of the 2023 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize. Alexander will be honored during William & Mary Law School’s 20th annual Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference, which will be held on October 26-27, 2023.
“Greg Alexander is most notably a leading member of a group of scholars dedicated to showing that the institution of property serves multiple values that together constitute and enable a well-lived life,” said James E. Krier, the Earl Warren DeLano Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and the 2012 recipient of the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize. “He has been a prolific contributor to property literature throughout his career, and one of the indispensable co-authors of an influential and widely adopted property casebook. The Brigham-Kanner Prize is a welcome acknowledgment of his work.”
The Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize is named in honor of the lifetime contributions to property rights of the late Toby Prince Brigham, founding partner of Brigham Moore, LLP, and Gideon Kanner, Professor of Law Emeritus at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. The prize is presented annually to a scholar, practitioner or jurist whose work affirms the fundamental importance of property rights.
An internationally renowned expert in property law and theory, Gregory Alexander, has taught at Cornell Law School since 1985.
After graduating from Northwestern University School of Law, Alexander clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He then spent a year as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He subsequently became a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, remaining there until joining the Cornell faculty.
Among Alexander’s many professional experiences, he has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, in Palo Alto, California and at the Max-Planck-Institutes for Comparative Law, in Hamburg and Heidelberg, Germany. He also has taught at UCLA, Virginia, and Harvard Law Schools, and was the Herbert Smith Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University.
Alexander is a prolific and recognized writer, the winner of the American Publishers Association's 1997 Best Book of the Year in Law award for his work, “Commodity and Propriety.” His other books include “The Global Debate Over Constitutional Property: Lessons for American Takings Jurisprudence” (Chicago), “Community & Property” (with Eduardo Peñalver) (Oxford), and “Properties of Property” (with Hanoch Dagan) (Aspen). His most recent book is “An Introduction to Property Theory” (with Eduardo Peñalver) (Cambridge).
“Greg Alexander is one of the current leading scholars of property law,” said Carol M. Rose, the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emerita of Law and Organization at Yale Law School and the Lohse Chair in Water and Natural Resources Law Emerita at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and the 2010 recipient of the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize. “His wide-ranging books and articles are well-known in the United States and internationally, and he is a recognized leader among the new school of progressive property law academics. His work constantly interrogates the institution of property as a social creation—one that does not simply endow the property holder with entitlement but simultaneously imposes powerful responsibilities to the society and the polity.”
Alexander joins an esteemed list of Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize winners. Previous recipients include Frank I. Michelman (2004), Richard Epstein (2005), James W. Ely, Jr. (2006), Margaret Jane Radin (2007), Robert C. Ellickson (2008), Richard E. Pipes (2009), Carol M. Rose (2010), Sandra Day O’Connor (2011), James E. Krier (2012), Thomas W. Merrill (2013), Michael M. Berger (2014), Joseph William Singer (2015), Hernando de Soto (2016), David L. Callies (2017), Stewart E. Sterk (2018), Steven J. Eagle (2019), Henry Smith (2020), Vicki Been (2021), and James S. Burling (2022).
About the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference
The Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference is renowned for its outstanding panel discussions and for bringing together members of the bench, bar and academia. Founded by William & Mary Law School alumnus Joseph T. Waldo ’78 in 2004, the conference is notable for its encouragement of active participation from the audience through its question and answer segments with each of the panels. Waldo served as conference co-chair from 2004-17, and in 2018, the Joseph T. Waldo Visiting Chair in Property Rights Law was named in his honor.
Sponsored by William & Mary Law School since its inception, the conference has taken on a larger international perspective as more and more countries deal with property rights issues. In 2011, the conference was held at Tsinghua Law School in Beijing, China, and in 2016 at the Grotius Center of International Legal Studies at the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands. Future international events are being planned.
To learn more about the William & Mary Law School’s Property Rights Project and the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Conference, please visit our web page.
About William & Mary Law School
Legal education in a university setting began at William & Mary in 1779. Now in its third century, America's first law school continues its historic mission of educating citizen lawyers who are prepared both to lead and to serve.