Journal Title
Florida Law Review
Volume
44
Issue
3
First Page
347
Document Type
Article
Publication Information
1992
Abstract
Carol Rose begins and ends her distinctive, wry commentary on gift and exchange with the idea that the only thing we really understand is larceny. Her presentation is delightfully grounded and lucid, with touches of humor to remind readers of her realistic context. The argument proceeds through ostensible game-theoretic musings, with hints of puzzles which she later turns into conundrums. The pace is even, clear, and inhabited by examples from property law which invite the reader along.
In Giving, Trading, Thieving and Trusting: How and Why Gifts Become Exchanges, and (More Importantly) Vice Versa, the title gives the agenda of Rose’s movement away. She proceeds through the tangible areas of property and contract law associated with gift and exchange, relentlessly pursuing the aspects of those legal areas that affirm the movement of freedom that gift entails. She questions the motives of first gift, the exchange, to see if either is guilty of larceny. She follows game theory to its logical conclusions and finds something contrary to the logic of exchange—the underlying relational realm of ongoing trust.
Recommended Citation
Emily Fowler Hartigan, Rose and Apple—Original Gifts?, 44 Fla. L. Rev. 347 (1992).