This dissertation is a study of the development of property rights in the coal industry as defined by Federal legislation. Previous analyses have argued that property rights develop efficiently and have employed a neoclassical model to study this development in the political market. This study asserts that the neoclassical model is inappropriate for analyzing the political market. This study concentrates on the coal industry, analyzing the historical events surrounding development of the property rights structure. A price theoretic approach is employed to determine whether changes in the property rights structure results in greater efficiency for the coal industry. The evidence provided in the study does not support use of the neoclassical model. The model is too constrained and does not allow the inclusion of nonmarket factors in the analysis. ; Ph. D.
Legal change and political philosophy / Maciej Chmielinski -- Standards of law-making as the parts of normative space in the post-modern democratic states : the question of justification and legitimacy of law / Tadeusz Biernat -- Public reason, background culture, and the justification of legal change / Michal Rupniewski -- The moral, the political, and the legal : changing patterns of justification in a world of legal pluralization / Eva Weiler -- Human rights : desiderata of a theory of change / Stephen Riley -- Legal "determinism" or/and legal "creationism"? : conservative-communitarian versus contractarian approaches to legal change / Maciej Chmielinski -- Natural law ethics and the issue of legal change / Michal Rupniewski -- Natural law against natural rights in the thought of Alasdair Macintyre / Kamil Aksiuto -- Kant's conception of legal change / Eduardo Charpenel -- Economism, voluntarism, and materialist historicism : three faces of the Marxist instrumental approach to legal change / Maciej Chmielinski -- Petrifying, disregarding or reforming customs : can customary law be changed in a liberal way? / Marc Goetzmann -- The "codification moment" : an attempt to define factors of effective law reform illustrated with the example of the Swiss Civil Code of 10 December 1907 / Maria Lewandowicz -- Exogenous institutional change as coercion and the ideological neutrality litmus : the case of Polish communism / J. Patrick Higgins -- The coercive control offence : a case study on overcriminalisation / Melissa Hamilton -- Individualism in times of crisis : theorising a shift away from classic liberal attitudes to human rights post 9/11 / Ian Turner -- Is the principle of legal certainty a human right? : the legitimacy of the retroactive application of laws / Jan Tryzna -- Conclusion: the philosophy of legal change as a research method / Michal Rupniewski.
